


Any Other Day

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Bodyswap, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-12
Updated: 2011-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-14 16:51:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 84,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/151422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hey, this one time? At Torchwood? Gwen and Jack switched bodies and everything went pear-shaped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Other Day

**Author's Note:**

> **Timeline:** Post-Meat, Pre-Reset (assumes flashback knowledge from Fragments)
> 
> Thanks to idyll, who caught four GLARING issues. Thanks to 51stcenturyfox and cruentum for the beta! Thanks also to Pornsultant Bob, who schooled me in the ways of cock, man-style. And I mean that practically—when you don't have one, you never stop to think about some of the day to day issues. SPECIAL THANKS to laurab1 for the bitching fanart! [Check it out!](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/456001.html)

**MONDAY**

 _Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes._ (Jack Handey)

 

It was on yet another stakeout when Gwen started the game. Everyone was on the comm, if not in the SUV, and Jack sat next to her in the driver's seat, unwrapping a Power Bar. They were on hour three, and she was pretty sure that he was eating because he was bored. That had to be bad.

"Stakeouts," she said.

"Stakeout _food_ ," he replied, frowning at the dirt-coloured bar.

"These sodding expense reports," Ianto said over the nonstop clatter of his typing.

"Fucking Xarxian entrails," Owen muttered.

"This Xarxian interface we found," Tosh breathed, as if she was distracted and in awe, "is bloody brilliant."

Gwen snickered, and over the comm, the typing continued, but she heard Ianto snort a little. Jack glanced at Gwen and grinned.

Owen grunted. "Tosh, you're supposed to think of something you _hate_."

"The game is called _I Love My Job,_ " Tosh replied. Gwen thought she sounded a little cross, but it was hard to tell. Jack leant forward in his seat and peered at a few shadows on the far wall of the alleyway in front of them.

"It's a joke," Owen grumbled. There was a squelching noise, the sound of Xarxian entrails splattering as they hit a metal tray. Jack cocked his head and glanced at Gwen, but he was still smiling. She stole his Power Bar and tossed it in the bin out her window, but he didn't even notice.

"...I don't think I get this game." Tosh sighed. "Jack, are these things on the edge of the motherboard supposed to glow?"

Jack shrugged and handled the car door with two fingers, almost pulling the lever. His eyes were riveted to the alley. "You tell me," he said.

"Anyway," Owen continued, "the game is ironic. Like rain on your wedding day."

Finally, the typing ceased. "That's not irony," Ianto interjected. "Nor is anything else in that song."

Gwen smiled in no general direction. She had forgotten that they were on a stakeout, and only remembered when, after a few seconds of silence, Jack opened the door to the SUV and shouted something to the effect of, "Oh, heads up!" He launched himself out onto the pavement, slamming the door and using the pushing motion to shove off and propel him down the street. Gwen watched him reach the alley at a dead run and tackle what looked like a bag lady before she could even get out of the car.

"What's going on?" Tosh blurted over the comm.

Gwen slowed her pace and shoved her hands in her pockets. "Jack's just tackled a homeless woman," she sighed, half-heartedly jogging to the alleyway where Jack and the woman were tousling in the bins. A frozen turkey rolled out into the street.

"Again?" Ianto asked, but was more of a statement, actually.

"Little help-oof! Hey!" Jack shouted into his headset, but more to Gwen, who drew her can of Weevil spray just in case. Jack was more than capable of subduing a drunken bag lady, and while she admired his exuberance, there were times that she thought his headstrong tendencies got them into more trouble than not.

"The last homeless person Jack tackled was just a scrotty Weevil," Owen noted. "You might want to--"

"Good lord those are sharp!" Jack yelled, and Gwen gave up lollygagging, launching herself into the fray just in time to dodge a fistful of talons. "Grab the ankle!" Jack yelled. "God, I love my job!"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Not a Weevil, then," Owen sniped as Ianto and Jack dragged the Xarxian carcass down into the autopsy bay and hefted it onto the counter. Ianto's face was red, and Jack was out of breath. Owen glared at Ianto. "So, is _that_ irony?"

"Only if you're a Canadian singer," Ianto answered without missing a beat. He leant on the alien's blue stomach and glared at Owen a bit before righting himself and wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

Jack sighed. "I dunno what's going on. Xarxians aren't usually this aggressive." And he meant it. He'd known several in the past, and none of them had been these rabid creatures. This was the third one they'd had to kill instead of subdue in the past two days. The third time was usually the charm. Or, he considered as he caught his breath, not.

Ianto leant against the wall. "What was it eating? Bricks?"

Come to think of it.... Jack reached out and poked the stomach, meeting with hard resistance before he smiled. "In a manner of speaking, yes."

Ianto rolled his eyes and yanked off his tie. "I'll make coffee."

"Really!" Jack exclaimed. Owen rolled towards him on his stool. "Feel this!" Jack stabbed the stomach again.

"Rather not," Ianto called over his shoulder.

Jack pressed his hands on the Xarxian's abdominal cavity. "There's something in here."

Owen reached out, laid a hand next to his on the stomach, and frowned. "I just stitched one of these up. Please tell me I don't have to open another one straight away." He grimaced. "They smell like rotten gym socks."

Jack rolled up his sleeves, grinning. Owen was very very correct. "Yeah, that's the stomach acids. Hey," he said, reaching past Owen for a pair of disposable gloves, "pass me a scalpel."

Owen rolled away from him. "What do you think you're doing?"

Jack smiled. "Making a mockery of anatomical pathology?"

Xarxians were tall and lumbery, almost like a Slitheen in body shape, but notably smaller. Also, as a plus, no skin suits. Their pinkish-blue skin was luminescent and therefore usually easy to see, but the few they had seen in the past week had been dull, as if their pearlescent sheen was tarnished. Jack had never seen a sick Xarxian before, but the first class about alien physiology that he'd ever taken at the Time Agency had stressed that most bio-luminescent beings visually dimmed when ill.

Jack braced himself and stared at the Xarxian's naked form. Not that Xarxians wore clothes, but this one had stolen a coat from somewhere. Its humanoid face was slack, eyes huge, nose slits and tiny mouth tight, almost seeming to be in pain, even in death.

A few minutes later, Jack dug a gloved hand in as Owen grimaced. "You _are_ making a mockery of pathology."

Jack smiled again, but it was more like a grit of teeth, because his eyes were watering a bit. The Xarxian smelled horrible. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but then he could _taste_ it, and he wasn't sure if that was better or worse. He yanked out a fistful of cutlery, tossing it on the tray in Owen's hands and splattering him with blue Day-Glo blood. Owen made a face but didn't say anything.

Jack's hands continued to dig, pushing aside mystery organs and fat, finally retrieving a teapot, a bent chrome hubcap, three silver teacups and a few silvery and gold lumpish artefacts not of Earth origin. Jack glanced at them as he deposited them on Owen's rapidly-filling tray; he'd have Tosh look at them once they'd been cleaned up a bit.

"What?" Gwen said from the top level of the theatre. "No license plates? No tin cans?" She tsked.

Jack fished about one more time in the cavity before he withdrew his hands and stepped away, stripping off his gloves and tossing them neatly in the bin. "Not shiny enough," he said, distracted, then looked regretfully at his shirtsleeves, which were tinged with neon blue.

"It ate," Owen paused for effect, "a silver service."

"Correction, it _hoarded_ a silver service," Jack told him over the rushing of the tap. His arms were starting to itch a little. Owen brought the tray over and set it in the bottom of the sink; the water began to sluice over the items they'd found, washing away ichor and blood and acids. Jack idly wondered if they'd still find tea leaves inside the teapot. A small gold ball caught his attention and he snorted; well, _that_ would be a treat if it still worked.

"Whatever for?" Owen asked, leaning against the railing and wiping his face with a damp towel.

Jack shrugged. "The Xarxians are like magpies. They collect shiny bright objects to bring home to their mates. Had one as a partner once for a few weeks." He frowned. "I bet that's where my Tetrallian stopwatch collection went." He grinned at Owen. "Figures."

Owen retrieved the autopsy spray and hosed down the body gently. "You were partnered with one of these? They're rather mean, and uhm...." He lowered the hose and glanced at Jack, seemingly at a loss for words.

"Mindless and violent," Gwen finished for him. Owen shot her with an imaginary gun to indicate that she'd found the right words, and Jack dried his hands with a towel.

"Like I said, the ones we've seen haven't been typical of the species. It could be a trip through the Rift, or maybe some chemical here on Earth. Most of them are, for all intents and purposes, more or less as barbaric or well-behaved as humanity." Gwen snorted behind him. "Just because something has talons doesn't mean it's a monster." He undid the first few buttons of his shirt and pulled it over his head, dumping it in the biohazard bin in the theatre before bounding up the stairs, intending on stopping off in his office. Maybe Ianto already had coffee for him. Or a fresh shirt. Or both.

Something about Gwen's arm stopped him, and he grabbed it, lifting it up and exposing the length of cut forearm that oozed through her field dressing. Just the red of it caused a little stab in his gut. She was so fragile; they were all so very fragile. Gwen flushed.

"Forgetting something?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "Owen, we got a live one here."

Gwen started down the stairs and Jack took a second to watch Owen's face turn from one of disgust at the body in front of him to one of clinical assessment. It was mysterious and reassuring at the same time.

And speaking of reassuring; Jack turned just in time to hear Ianto depress the steam wand.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The conference table was cluttered with an array of alien devices, all scavenged from the Xarxian's stomach cavity. They ranged in shape from a head-sized metal box, to what looked like a blaster of some sort, to a small round gold ball carved with notches that reminded Ianto of a rubic's cube. He laid out the carafe of coffee on the sideboard just in case Gwen or Jack wanted a refill and set out Tosh's teacup; Owen's battered, chipped mug was already steaming in front of him.

Jack settled in his seat and picked up the round ball, shaking it as he held it to his ear. Both people on either side of him ducked under the table until he barked a laugh.

"It's a music box. Like a rain stick." He looked disappointed. "It's 31st century Oipes. Supposed to sound like the wind through the disembodied forest of Ap, but the organics inside must have been eaten away by the stomach acids."

Tosh rose from under the table. "I dropped my pen," she fibbed, glancing at Owen, who was returning to his own seat. Gwen shot him a look and he raised his hands.

"I won't lie. I was trying to escape impending doom." He gestured.

Ianto settled across from Gwen and took a moment to sip his tea before paying attention to Jack, whose hands traipsed across the artefacts in front of him like a man desperate for touch to recall memory. He wondered just how much information Jack could possibly have stored in his head. For all that he didn't know, Jack was a frightfully large fount of information, when he wasn't telling tall tales about Haxian sex spores and lying through his teeth. According to Ianto's running mental tally, Jack was right about or able to supply appropriate information about things that fell through the Rift approximately seventy percent of the time.

It was infuriating. Ianto prided himself on knowing everything, or at least, more than everyone else in the room. Jack just trumped that, times infinity.

"Tosh," Jack was saying, "we need readings on all of this stuff, even the broken music ball."

Tosh nodded and messed about with her laptop. "Actually, I took a few after Owen cleaned them. Everything here is inert, er, damaged I guess." She pointed to the large head-sized box. "Except that. Low levels of radiation, but nothing to worry about. A steady pulse of energy. My guess is whatever that is, it's powered down."

Jack touched the top of the box. "And the writing? It looks familiar."

Ianto crossed his legs under the table and shifted. Of course it looked familiar. Everything looked familiar.

"That's Q'nog," she said, tapping her laptop so that her screen displayed on the monitor behind Jack, who swiveled to look at it. Gwen frowned and blinked at the scrolling glyphs; Owen gnawed on a biscotto in an appalling manner. Ianto made a mental note to Hoover in the room later. "We have the language in its most rudimentary form translated roughly through the databases that we appropriated from Torchwood One when it, uhm." Her eyes flitted to Ianto, and he smiled tightly.

He was over it. Well, no, he wasn't, he never would be, but he was over it enough for that. Tosh's nervousness was touching anyway.

"Well, what does it say?" Owen asked. "'For a good time call Jenny'?"

Tosh shrugged. "The program isn't finished yet, but early transcripts look like some sort of cross between an instruction manual and a legal brief. You know, 'Party of the first part, insert tab A into slot B, party of the second part'.…" She smiled. "That's rather naughty."

Jack grinned and sipped from his coffee. "I have taught you well, little Toshiko."

"Why does it seem like everything that falls through the Rift these days is a sex toy?" Gwen asked, stirring her coffee with the remains of her biscotti.

"Sometimes it's a death ray," Owen offered helpfully.

"Sometimes both," Ianto added.

They all nodded and stared at the box. Ianto willed it to open or move or something, if only to make them all jump, but no such luck.

Finally, Jack slapped his hands on the tabletop. "Excellent work, I must say. Now we can all go away and not come back for…" He consulted his watch. "Eight hours."

Owen sighed. "Not even enough time to get drunk and sober up."

Ianto secretly thought that Owen talked about more drinking than he actually did. Tosh rolled her eyes at him and pushed away from the table, dragging her laptop with her and heading for the stairs, Owen on her heels. Ianto set about clearing coffee mugs and debated leaving them in the sink to wash tomorrow. It was a futile thought, he pondered, because once he got down there he'd start washing without thinking about it. Maybe if he made a _conscious_ effort to avoid turning on the tap.

Jack stood, but he stuffed his hands in his pockets and bent over to peer at the box on the table. Ianto made a mental note to get some gloves and store the box in the temporary safe until they had a chance to figure out what the box did. Too many fiascoes in the past had been precipitated by the judicious mishandling of alien tech, like the time Suzie had left a Cadrassian pain ring out on Owen's desk for the weekend, and two days later he had mistaken it for a coaster. On second thought, that might not have been a mistake.

Jack reached out with one finger and poked the box.

Gwen sucked in her breath. "Jack, I don't think you should mess about with it until Tosh has—"

Jack sighed and crossed his arms, tucking his hands under his armpits. "Yeah, you're right. It's just…." he reached out again, one hand tapping the shiny metal finish at the top of the box. "There's something about—"

"Jack," Gwen said again, reaching out to slide the box towards herself and out of his grasp. Ianto almost tried to intervene. After all, he would be the one logging and cataloguing it later once it was safe to place in the archives, so that technically made it his responsibility.

But Gwen and Jack's hands froze on the top of the box, which had decidedly begun to _glow_. Ianto took one step forward as Jack turned his head to look at him.

"Don't—" he said, and then there was a flash of light and Ianto fell back against the glass window; it shuddered under his weight but thankfully didn't break. Gwen and Jack were thrust backwards more violently; Gwen flew several feet into the wall of the conference room. Jack staggered back, tripped over a chair and spun, hitting his head on one of the structural steel posts.

Everything was a blur for a second, and then everything Ianto saw was covered with a series of coloured dots. He heard Owen and Tosh calling, the clamor of their feet on the metal steps, and his own raspy breathing as he felt his chest seem to re-inflate.

"Ianto," Tosh said, kneeling next to him and grasping his shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Ianto glanced over to where Owen was jostling Gwen a little, sitting her up and shining a light in her eyes. Gwen's hands batted him away, and he grabbed her by her chin. "Gwen, hold still. Are you all right? Does it hurt anywhere?"

Jack rolled over and groaned, and something in the sound of it was off. Ianto stood shakily, leaning heavily on Tosh until he could reach out and place most of his weight on the conference table. His hands were shaky and he blinked rapidly to try to clear the swimming dots from his vision. Gwen was on her feet unsteadily, pushing Owen away. Jack had pulled himself up with the aid of the edge of the table.

Gwen touched a hand to her forehead and then froze. "Good god," she said, grasping her chest in shock. Ianto blinked once at the sound of Gwen's voice belting out in American tones. Gwen's eyes widened and she grabbed her crotch, only to pull her hands away as if they were burned. "Oh no. Where's Gwen?"

Ianto looked over to Jack, who gripped the edge of the table, taking deep breaths. He looked distinctly like he was hyperventilating. Owen reached out and grasped Jack's arm, and he glanced up, eyes wild. "Owen?" Ianto listened to the voice, distinctly different, and felt the last few gears in his head attempt to grind to a halt.

Owen let go of Jack's arm and backed up a step. Jack's body stumbled forward, but the legs were either too shaky, or the person in Jack's body didn't know how to use their length. "What happened? What's…." Jack's new voice trailed off and one hand reached up to his face. Tosh made a little squeak next to Ianto as her own brain undoubtedly caught up.

Gwen's body sank down in a chair. "Oh, I feel like hurling," the body said, its voice soft and very very feminine.

Owen glanced back and forth, crossing his arms, and then turned to Ianto. "So, is _this_ ironic?"

Ianto ignored him, instead glancing at Gwen's body, unmistakably Gwen's, but already the eyes alone shone with a _knowing_ that didn't belong to her. "Are you Jack? Really Jack?" he whispered.

Gwen's body closed its eyes. "Follow the protocol," it said, voice small and flat.

Jack's head shot up. "The what?"

Ianto nodded, crouching in front of what he suspected wasn't Gwen and placing one hand on her knee. "Who are you?"

Gwen's body smiled, and that was all that Ianto needed. He let him talk anyway. "Captain Jack Harkness. ID 4502-parsnip-B64M-star. My turn-ons include fast cars, vowels, and raspberry yogurt. Turn-offs include Ozzy Osbourne, tapeworms, and dandruff." Jack's new body raised an eyebrow. "The last time we had sex, you broke one of the wheels on the autopsy table, and then later we used almost all of the tourniquets to—"

"It's Jack," Ianto said, taking his hand back.

"So," Owen said into the silence, "Is _this_ ironic?"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Fifteen minutes and two full body scans later, Gwen and Jack were seated at the table in the conference room once again, as Tosh and Ianto scrambled to confine the box into the safe with as little contact as possible. Owen reviewed the results of the scans on the screen, and lectured in what was almost a distant voice.

"Everything is normal. Blood screens should be finished in a hour or so, but I'm betting that they're fine too." He tapped the screen, on which numbers scrolled through repetitive readouts of the EEGs and sonograms. The Biometric Machine results played on another screen. "I'd like to get you under a PET scanner and in an MRI machine, just to look at your brains, but that'd be just a passing academic fancy," he finished.

Tosh sat down in her chair, a little stunned. She studiously did _not_ look at either Gwen or Jack, and instead focused her attention on the array of stale biscuits that Ianto had set out earlier and in the chaos forgotten to clear off. Owen passed a few more results across the screen, watching Jack's face. Or rather, Gwen's face, but with Jack in her….

Ianto decided that he was going to have to clarify this, so that in his head he wasn't confusing himself. "I propose that for the time being, and for our own sanity, we make a conscious effort to call Jack and Gwen by their names," he said, sitting at the table on Jack's right. "Not the names of their current bodies. Okay Gwen?"

Gwen looked up at Ianto from where she'd been slumped in her chair. Somehow her wide eyed expression had transferred bodies with her, and Jack's face looked impossibly lost. Ianto didn't blame her. He was still very weirded out, and he was firmly ensconced in his own flesh.

He checked the front of him just to be sure. Suit. Yes. Good.

Jack gave him an appraising look, and he knew he'd have to ask about it later. It wasn't even remotely sexual, but there was an undercurrent of _something_ , something unfamiliar. On the other hand, he wondered how much of Jack was going to be triply difficult to decipher because of the body that currently housed him. Currently housed. Ianto liked the sound of that.

He checked his suit again just to be sure.

"Good idea," Jack said, smiling. "Though, in public, you should use the body names. No one is going to believe I'm named Jack with these—" He started to cup his breasts when Ianto kicked him under the table. "Oh yeah. Okay then. Tosh?"

Tosh looked up from where she was crumbling a Hob Nob into small geometric piles on the table. "Yeah? I mean, yes?" She glanced from Jack to Gwen and then back to Jack.

"Anything more on that box?"

Tosh sighed. "The program is still running. But I've set the search program to look for anything already entered in the Archives that's Q'nog in origin. Or related. Or starting with Q." She abandoned her biscuit sculpture, and Ianto watched as she swept up her mess into a napkin and tossed it carefully in the bin nearby. There was a reason he was fond of Tosh. That wasn't even the greatest of them, but it was a nice one, pretty much indicative of her entire personality.

Ianto often wondered if they could get her a mail-order bride. With a degree in astrophysics and quantum mechanics or something.

Ianto cleared his throat. "There's a whole row dedicated to Q in the archives downstairs that hasn't been electronically transferred yet. I should go down there and start looking for anything that resembles the…" he hadn't given it a name. "The Gender Bender."

Gwen snapped out of her disorientation enough to smile at him and set her hands on the table. She turned the backs of them over to look at the palms, and one of her hands reached up to play with Jack's large wristwatch. Ianto noticed that she avoided touching the wrist strap. He was about to suggest that she give the wrist strap to Jack for the time being when Jack sat back in his chair.

"Good then. Owen, you and Ianto need to make your way through the files as quickly as possible. Tosh needs to finish the translation, and Gwen, you have to fake a call to Torchwood Two with me."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Sometimes, Jack wondered when he had become the sort of person who would ever agree to a position that required paperwork. That required clearances, responsibility. That required _conference calls_.

As he scribbled his codes on a post-it so that Gwen could say them into the speakerphone if she needed to (Archie was anything but unorthodox.), he listened to her Welsh voice try very hard to sound like an American. At any other time he might have been amused, but Archie had information they might need, and he was notoriously cranky. He'd once locked Jack out of the remote archives just for suggesting that baseball was anything like cricket.

Later, Jack was going to take a moment to be amused at the situation. Later, when he knew what the hell they were dealing with, and if it was permanent, and well, when they actually _knew_ things. Stopping now to smell the roses (he wasn't even going to go anywhere with that one out loud right now) then and there wasn't going to help Gwen, who still had a halo of shock about her.

He couldn't blame her. All jokes about his body aside, switching with anyone was a mindfuck. Sometimes a literal mindfuck, but mostly just metaphorical.

He decided to concentrate on the task at hand and woolgather later. "Archie is going to give you a hard time. It's two in the morning and he's an early riser. Don't let him verbally manhandle you," Jack said. Gwen sat in Jack's chair in front of the phone and stared at the receiver.

"Tell me again," she said in her very male and Welsh voice, "why I don't have your accent?"

Jack smirked. "Because all human throats are biologically the same."

Gwen sighed. "Oh yeah. I keep forgetting."

"Say it one more time," he asked, finger above the phone.

Gwen rolled her eyes. "Captain Jack Harkness," she drawled.

"Too John Wayne. Again."

"Captain Jack Harkness."

Jack reached over and hit the speed dial and the speakerphone at the same time. "Better. Make it more. Uhm."

Gwen grinned. "Smarmy? Cap'n Jack Harkness. How are you, sexy mama?"

Jack smirked. "Good. But don't say that to Archie. Something about writing checks that your ass can't cash. Trust me on that one." He glanced behind the desk. "It's my ass."

"Hello?" said the line suddenly, and they froze. Jack decided that Gwen's wide-eyed look was something that she had carried with her into his body, and man, was it kind of sexy. But not like, _him_ sexy. He certainly didn't mind looking at Gwen do it in his body, but he couldn't imagine making that face into a mirror.

He wondered if Ianto could get them a camera. They had to have cameras around here, for god's sake. Alien cameras, with x-ray options and shit.

"Archie," Gwen said, "Uhm, hi there!" Jack felt that everything was going to go awry, but he scrolled his wrist and pointed to the script. "This is Jack Harkness."

"Oh, _is_ it now?" said the gruff voice on the other end of the phone. Jack suppressed a surge of glee. If they caught Archie when he was groggy and not quite awake, then they might be able to get away with this. It wasn't that Jack was afraid of what would happen if they told Archie, not when Torchwood even had procedures in place for body swapping. It was more like he didn't want _Archie_ to know. Archie, whom Jack had known for thirty years, and who seemed to make a minor hobby out of irritating Jack simply because he could.

"Yeah," Gwen said, eyes wide as Jack scribbled furiously. "Uhm, how are you?" Jack rolled his eyes and shoved the piece of paper at her. Once again, he realised that they should have planned this out more thoroughly. Hell he should have had Ianto plan it out; he would have made a graph, and a pie chart, maybe one of those flowcharts.

Too late. "Oh, I was fine, until you woke me up," Archie groused. "Been up all night transcribing those piss-poor rift reports you send through the old Torchwood One system, since you refuse to do it yourself at your shitehole…"

Jack scratched out 'CUT HIM OFF' and underlined it. Gwen shook her head at him, and then something clicked in her face as she probably remembered that she was supposed to be Jack, and that Jack was rude and abrupt on the phone.

"Yeah, that's great," she said dismissively, and Jack gave her a thumbs up sign. She slid the paper closer to herself and leant forward in her seat. "Listen Archie, I've got a load of rabid Xarxians and they're hoarding some tech that I can't seem to figure out, and I need you to—"

"You need," Archie cut across the line, his voice very awake. Jack sucked in a breath. It was awake Archie. They were going to be screwed. "You _need_ , Jack, a lesson in manners."

Gwen looked at Jack, and the corner of her mouth twitched. "Look, I'm sorry, Archie, but…" she trailed off when Jack used his pencil to write 'NO NO NO NO NO NO' on the paper and underlined it so hard that the tip of his pencil broke.

An apology from him was all Archie needed. "Wait, who is this again?" Just from the lilt of his accent, Jack could tell they were boned.

Gwen sighed. "This is Cap'n Ja—look, Archie, this is Gwen Cooper," she said, her accent rounded and soft, cutting through Jack's tenor like so much mincemeat. "We spoke a few times last year, yeah?"

There was a long break, and Jack glanced at the light on the phone next to line three to make sure that they were still connected, and then he knew that Archie was capable of making the connection. He might have been stuck up there in Torchwood Two, but he was the oldest member of Torchwood in its history, aside from Jack, and he read everything that came across all desks.

"Oh, aye, Gwen, "Archie finally said, his tone light. Gwen recited her codes to him, and Jack was surprised that she bothered to do it in front of him until he realised that they'd have to get new codes after the body switch anyway. It was SOP. When she was finished, Archie chuckled a little. "What was that joke you told me about the Scottish Rolling Stones song?"

Gwen smiled, and Jack banged his head off the desk. "D'you mean, 'Hey, MacLeod, Get Offa My Ewe'?"

Archie laughed outright. "That'd be the one. I can only surmise from your voice that you and Jacky Boy aren't…" Jack knew he was searching for the appropriate words. Or rather, the _funny_ words. "… _feeling quite yourselves_."

Jack rolled his eyes.

It was at that moment that Ianto stepped into the office, waving a slim buff file folder. Very slim. His face wasn't the one of smug delight that he wore when he knew the answers, either. Jack didn't like where this was going. Ianto rounded Jack's desk and flipped the file open in front of Gwen, and Jack leant in to see. The upper half of the only paper was a photograph of the device identical to the one they had in their possession, and the paper taped into the file below it read:

 **Q'nog Trans______:** (1940) _file on loan @ Torchwood 4_

"Oh Jesus," Gwen groaned.

Archie snorted into the phone. "Harkness, come on, let me hear your dulcet tones."

Jack braced his hands on either side of the desk and leant into the phone. "Archie, it's a Q'nog Trans…." he frowned at the lines. What did that mean? "Trans something."

Archie ignored his 'dulcet tones' and instead coughed a few times. He probably had a cigarette attached to his mouth by now. "If you have that information, then your archivist must be there too. Jones?"

Ianto leant towards the speakerphone needlessly. "Sir."

"Not that I don't trust Missy Cooper, but can I get a few more security codes from you? Maybe a bit of a song?"

Ianto's lips twitched, and Jack wondered just when Ianto and Archie had gotten close enough for them to have a private code. Ianto gave a standard verbal clearance, which of course they'd have to change later, then rattled off a few security items that apparently only the archivists were aware of, and then he recited something in Welsh that sounded like a poem.

Archie must have been satisfied because he sighed. "Oh aye, Ianto. You'll do. When are you going to leave that half-arsed operation and come up here to reorganise the artefacts vaults?"

The corner of Ianto's mouth quirked again, and he cut a sly glance at Gwen, or rather what he instinctively knew to be Jack's body, and it must have occurred to him, because his face reddened and he glanced at Jack before shaking his head. "Not until you can match my benefits package here, sir."

"And that'll not be soon, I imagine."

Ianto tapped the photo absently. "Probably not, sir." Jack smirked and crossed his arms, which was very different when there were breasts in the way. Kind of nice. Kind of mashed. He settled for crossing them under his breasts, so that they were kind of resting on his arms. His mind tried to remember how Gwen did it. It was funny how he couldn't remember, which was even funnier, since this was one of Gwen's favorite intimidating postures and he had a healthy amount of regard for her cleavage.

"And you have yourselves a Q'Nog Trans______?" he said, leaving a long pause and a bit of a sibilant sound on the end. Ah that's right. That line was the verbal cue for a coda. Jack rolled his eyes at himself.

"Yes," Ianto said. "I'm afraid that our file is on loan to Torchwood Four."

Jack felt his stomach drop when Archie began to cackle.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"It's a _marital aid_?" Tosh squeaked. Her head peeked out from behind her laptop and she looked at them all over her glasses.

Ianto shrugged as he glanced through the faxed report that Archie had sent him. It had taken about ten minutes to calm Archie down long enough to agree to send _anything_ , and by then Jack had stormed from the office, and Gwen had retreated from the room after him, instead choosing to haunt the upper railing of the autopsy theatre to stalk Owen's blood test results. Ianto had been sucked into a discussion about the official Torchwood position on body swapping (on purpose and by accident, for business or pleasure, for free and for profit, possibly for espionage), and he'd sat in Jack's chair, drumming his fingers on the desk and listening to Archie light cigarette after cigarette as he puttered about the paper records of Torchwood Two's cavernous underground archive. Occasionally he heard the beeping of Archie's motorised cart (the very notion that one needed a vehicle to navigate the archives there made his heart speed up in anticipation).

By the time he'd gotten the faxes from the upstairs (Ianto often thought that the tourist office was a rather idiotic place to have a facsimile machine that received secured documents, but then again, perhaps that was what made it so perfect.), Jack and Gwen were sitting in the boardroom again, facing each other and staring. Ianto had stopped to watch them for a second before clearing his throat, and Gwen had jumped. Jack had sighed and said something about mind melding.

Now, Owen shrugged and pulled the papers towards him. "Marital aid, like sexual aid? Kinky." He slid the papers back towards Jack. "I get it. You walk about like the opposite sex—walk a mile in their Chucks." He glanced under the table at Jack's Converse-clad feet.

"Owen, 'marriage aid' as in 'counseling'."

"Oh. Disappointing."

Gwen hit him in the shoulder.

"Here's how it works, kids," Jack said, snapping his fingers and pointing to Gwen. "The missus and I have been married for fifteen years, and we're going through a rough patch. She's grumpy and the sex isn't as good."

Gwen scowled, but one of the corners of her mouth quirked. Ianto knew that look from both bodies. In some ways, Gwen and Jack were frightfully similar. "He's filled out in the middle a bit and I caught him with pictures of naked men on his computer," she retorted.

"I don't understand why she needs fifteen million pairs of black shoes that all look the same," Jack added, waving a hand but smiling.

"I have told him repeatedly that even though they're both black, a mule heel is _not_ the same as an open-toed slingback."

"And she doesn't like that sometimes you have to watch the game with your mates down at the local pub."

Gwen barked a laugh. "He can't figure out how to change the loo roll."

Jack stopped. "I totally know how to do that."

Gwen rolled her eyes. "You could have fooled me."

Owen snorted and Tosh laughed outright, but Ianto slid the folder away from Jack and began opening the prongs on the top to properly slot the papers in. "And lo, we have exposition."

Jack shook his head and stood, taking a turn about the room; he did that when he was thinking out loud. "Right. So you go to a counselor, and talk about your feelings." He used airquotes, and Tosh and Gwen looked rather offended. "Still, you can't seem to connect."

"So…you decide what better way to bond than over the disorienting trauma of swapping bodies?" Ianto finished for him. "I fail to see how that is going to solve the issue of the unchanged bog roll."

Jack shrugged. "The Q'nog are a race entirely unto themselves. They don't even have remotely similar physiology, and if I remember correctly, they have a mild form of telepathy. Who knows how the box affects them? Maybe they live partly in their own body and partly in their partner's. Maybe they don’t switch bodies at all, but get a link with their partner's mental state." He shrugged. "I got nothing."

"Is it…turned off?" Owen asked curiously. "It's not going to go off randomly and I'll wake up as Myfanwy or something."

Tosh rolled her eyes. "We should be so lucky. No. The box is dormant again, but it's got a sort of trace reading that shows it as operative. Because of—" She nodded her head in both directions, "Jack and Gwen." Ianto noted that she referred to their bodies in the aforementioned manner; Tosh was pragmatic and capable of grasping abstract concepts quickly. "I don't think anyone else should touch it if they haven't, you know, touched it already."

"So if it went off again," Owen muttered, fiddling with a swizzle stick, "and Ianto and Tosh were touching it—"

"Probably the same thing," Jack cut in, as Tosh's eyes widened and then narrowed in irritation. Gwen made a distinct noise of disapproval. "I find it hard to believe that Gwen and I are somehow special in this regard." He grinned at Ianto. "Well, any more than we already are."

Ianto rolled his eyes. Owen turned to Gwen. "But then we'd get CCTV footage of hot lesbian sex."

Gwen punched his arm, probably harder than she meant to, because she looked immediately sorry when Owen cried out in pain, and Tosh must have kicked him under the table because he pushed away and said something to the effect of "Oi!" at the same time Tosh blurted out, "That's _my_ body we're talking about!"

Jack stared at Ianto speculatively for a few seconds and Ianto tried his best to look scandalised. He steadfastly avoided looking at Tosh in any manner that might reveal what he was currently thinking. Jack sucked in a breath and then shook his head. "No. No lesbian sex. No tinkering with the machine _at all_. I want my chassis back when this is all over."

"Will this _be_ over?" Gwen asked softly. Ianto thought to make her a cuppa, but wasn't sure that he could stand at the moment. And he still was not looking at Tosh.

"The good news is that it's not permanent," Jack said, clapping his hands and smiling weakly. Ianto thought that he was starting to realise that no one seemed to find all of this humorous except him. Well, and Owen, but then again, Owen's taste for schadenfreude was legend.

"I mean," Jack continued, "the device is a 'you see what life is like for me, I see what it's like for you,' kind of thing. Wouldn't be useful for the marriage if the couples switched permanently."

Ianto heard Gwen say a fervent prayer and he realised that he'd never heard her pray before. And he'd heard her mumbling at the end of the world.

"That _said_ ," Jack said, "we can't just switch back whenever we want. It has a failsafe so that we can't change our minds until the preset date. And Tosh? Have you found that yet?"

Tosh smiled. "I have. Your adventure ends in…" she glanced at her screen and frowned. "Nineteen Geelucks."

Gwen's head finally hit the table.

Jack clicked his tongue in his mouth and stared at the ceiling. "Geelucks…Geelucks. Gee…lucks, nope, can't convert that."

Tosh typed furiously. "Hold on. Wait." Ianto removed his stopwatch and hit the button. It was a thing. "Ah! Geelucks. Yes. No. Oh dear." She leant back in her chair and pushed her glasses further up her nose. "'Geeluck: unit of measurement from the sun of Paz to the end of Lucean. Also a novelty pasty on the Isle of Bihnz.'" Ianto clicked the stopwatch and reset it, then started again.

One. Two. Three. Four—

"Oh! So, like, one, seventeen, uhm," Jack's eyes off centered and he flipped his fingers in and out in a counting gesture. Gwen stared at him desperately and Owen mimed snoring. "Hey," Jack said, "I failed Conversions only once, and that was a total set up."

Ianto stopped the stopwatch and turned a few pages in his folder. "The Geeluck is roughly eight point eight four hours." He raised an eyebrow at Tosh, and she just looked relieved. Jack gave him the 'what?' hand gesture and he raised the folder. "Archie is thorough."

"So that's—what, a week? Give or take?" Gwen said, closing her eyes and taking in a deep breath. Ianto closed the folder and set the stopwatch on top of it. Owen rifled through his folders uselessly; he didn't seem to be keen on watching Gwen mentally break down in Jack's body. "Okay. I can do a week."

Jack slapped a hand on her shoulder. "Thatta girl."

"As fascinating and worrying as all of this has been," Owen said, looking down at the files on front of him before glancing up and meeting Gwen's eyes. He shuddered. "How fuckingly fucked this is," he amended. "We might want to continue to be concerned about the fact that we a, pulled this miraculous device from the innards of a completely different alien species, which b, according to Jack, is behaving in an erratic and unusually violent manner."

Jack sat back down, but put his feet up on the table and looked at his shoes. Gwen stood and paced a bit, shoving her hands in her pockets before she froze and abruptly pulled them out and crossed her arms, blushing furiously. Ianto smirked.

"Oh yeah," Jack mused. "That _is_ troublesome."

For a few minutes what Ianto referred to as 'official Torchwood training' kicked in for everyone, as they turned their minds to the other problem on hand, the Xarxian Carcass Crisis, as he liked to call it, though it was far from a crisis. Well, not yet. It was something they all did very well, work under mysterious and abnormal conditions.

It was settled: Owen would work on the autopsy, Tosh would tweak the translation a bit and see if the rift had dumped any more Xarxians out into the streets, Ianto would make sure that everyone was still sane, and Gwen and Jack would try to figure out a way to live in each other's bodies for the next week, which meant very little prep for Jack, now that Torchwood Two knew about the body switch and there was no need to hide it anymore, but a very large problem for Gwen.

It was after they had split up and were headed back to their respective posts that Jack followed Gwen down the stairs and snagged her by the elbow. "Gwen," he said slowly, as if the idea was still forming in his own mind, "I think that until this blows over, you might want to stay here."

Gwen shrugged. "Give me a minute to think about it."

"Don't take too long. It's two in the morning, and we can't keep your strapping fiancé at bay forever." Jack sat down at her computer and used the toes of his sneakers to move the rollers about. "You have tiny feet," he said distractedly, and then did a soft shoe routine on the grating.

"It's times like this I'm glad Rhys knows about Torchwood," Gwen said, flopping down on the sofa. It made a creak when her full weight hit it. She turned her hands over and stared. "My hands are enormous."

Jack smiled and spun around in her chair. "You know what they say about men with—"

"I'm not looking down my pants, Jack."

Jack's grin just grew. It was unnerving. Apparently, Gwen had just as many teeth as Jack did, but he just displayed them better. "You will. Eventually."

She rolled her eyes and Owen snorted. "That's just creepy." To Jack he said, "Stop smiling like that. You make Gwen look like a nutter."

Jack just rolled the chair over to the edge of the area, launched himself out of it a little gracelessly and grabbed her hand. "Come on. I'll teach you how to pee standing up."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ianto raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure about this?"

Gwen sighed. "I'll talk to him. I just need you to…" she cast about for the right word. "Soften the blow a bit." If they had learnt anything from the call to Archie, it was that deception wasn't the best policy, or rather, she'd promised to be up front with Rhys. She certainly didn't trust Jack on the phone with him, and her current voice wasn't going to inspire any confidence.

Ianto looked at her then, into her eyes like he did when he was having a silent conversation with Jack, and she decided that if this was what worked for him when looking at this body, then she was going to go with it. She folded her hands in front of her, as if in prayer, like she'd seen Jack do many times, and mouthed the word please.

Ianto reddened and glanced away. "Don't. Don't do that. I'll call."

 _Oops._ Gwen wondered if she and Ianto were going to be able to look at each other when this was all over. Just being in Jack's body seemed to betray some of his and Ianto's secrets, and she wasn't sure that she even wanted to know them in the first place.

Ianto dialed her mobile and ran a hand through his hair, walking away from her and across the atrium, pacing a bit as he heard Rhys's voice. "Hello, Rhys? This is Ianto Jones, from Torchwood. No, no, it's fine, _she's_ fine. Not a scratch on her." Pause. "There's been a bit of a cock-up and Gwen asked me to call…." His voice drifted away as he rounded the water tower and Gwen didn't follow him. Instead, she waited, frozen, her hands clenching the edge of her desk. Tosh looked up from her computer to give her a sympathetic smile.

Ianto was finishing his short story as he returned to her, ending the circuit with, "…in Jack's body."

"SHE WHAT?" came though the mobile, and Ianto jerked it away from his ear, holding it out to her.

"He's all yours," he said, frowning. She caught the mobile before he dropped it.

Gwen closed her eyes and sighed, sitting down on the edge of her desk. Jack was nowhere to be found, but that might have been a blessing. She ducked down, bent over with the phone clutched to her ear and whispered into it. "Rhys, I know this is strange, but you have to trust that it's me. I could tell you something, like, when we were at Uni, you drank too many vodka tonics and shaved yourself like the bloke in The Wall." Ianto had wandered away, but he was hovering near enough to hear, and he stopped what he was doing long enough to raise an eyebrow at her. "And then when your hair started to grow back, you had to go to the clinic—"

"Are you saying this out loud in front of your co-workers?"

Gwen winced. "Only a little," she capitulated. "Look, it's only for a week, and –"

"Jesus, Gwen." Rhys groaned, "couldn't it have been one of the others, like Ianto, or the scrawny one?"

Gwen glanced at Owen, imagined him in her body, and felt the distinct urge to shower. "No, I'm sorry, I wasn't planning this," she snapped a little. "Next time I unexpectedly change bodies with a co-worker, I'll make sure it's Tosh." Tosh looked up from her monitor and grinned, flashing her a thumbs up sign.

Rhys must have thought of her being in another female body, particularly one as cute as Tosh's, because he was taking too long to come back with an answer. She felt her brow crease and had to touch it. Facial expressions were creepy when she made them with a face that wasn't hers. Well, it was hers, if only for now, and only technically.

"Like I was saying, it's only for a week, and I think it would just be odd, me being there. So, I'm going to stay here, at the Hub," she said into the silence. "I think it might just be for the best."

"You're not having me on, are you?" Rhys said voice almost too soft to hear. "What if you stay this way forever, Gwennie?"

Gwen felt her heartbeat speed up at the thought. Jack came into the room from the depths of the Hub. He strolled through the lower level down by the water pool, absently turning her engagement ring on his finger. Her own hand felt horribly naked quite suddenly. Jack glanced up at her and smiled, but it was wan. She wondered if they, like the Q'Nog, weren't just a little aware of each other in their minds right now.

"I'm not going to stay this way. That wasn't a guess. We have hard data on this machine."

"Not hard enough to keep you from mucking about with it," Rhys griped.

Jack crossed his arms and stared at her pointedly. Gwen sighed. "I can't. I can't do this now. I'm tired and scared, and honestly Rhys, I wish I could just curl up in bed with you right now." Jack opened his arms to her and made a questioning look. She shook her head sternly at the suggestion. "But I don't think that would be a good idea, considering," she said, partly to them both.

There was a long pause. "Is he there?"

Jack climbed the steps to her desk and reached for the mobile. Gwen pursed her lips and held on tightly. He tried to take it from her, making the 'I'll handle this' gesture that he pulled off so well when he was in his own body, but Gwen found that she could hold him off with a hand to his chest. Longer arms were pretty useful.

"Yeah he's here. Do you want to talk to him?"

There was another long pause. "No. No I don't think I do."

Gwen exhaled. Thank god for small favours.

Rhys promised to bring by a bag of clothes for Jack, mumbled a few more confused and shell-shocked sentences and hung up the phone. Gwen stared at the blinking _Call Ended_ on the display before clearing it. "That went. Well," she finished, shoving her hands in her pockets. Jack wasn't wearing underwear. Or rather, she wasn't wearing underwear. It was distracting.

"I must say," Owen called from the autopsy theatre. "Rhys Williams might very well be the most understanding man on the planet. When this is all over, we should make him an honorary Torchwood member. Get him a sew-on patch for his merit sash."

Gwen gave him two fingers.

"When this is all over," she said aloud, "I expect a mini-break."

Jack laughed. "When this is over, I'm getting a haircut." He brushed at her face with one hand and she ducked away from his fingers.

"When this is over," Ianto finished for them, "you two are going to be buried in the post-body switching paperwork. It comes in a bound portfolio."

Jack and Gwen groaned. That was just what they needed

"On that note, we should all call it an evening, have a lie-in tomorrow. Tosh!" Jack called, "Owen! Go home!" To Gwen he said. "You can have the bunk, if you want. Or the sofa, but I'll warn you; you're too tall for it now. And you might not need to sleep. I know I'm exhausted." He yawned, and then considered that for a moment, as if the action had surprised him. It occurred to Gwen that she had never actually seen Jack yawn before. "That's a nostalgic feeling." Then he looked at her, _looked_ at her, standing there in his body, and something he saw must have bothered him, because he turned and started down the walk at a brisk clip.

Gwen followed him across the walkway. "Wait a minute, Jack," Gwen said. Jack stopped in front of her and turned, hand still on the bluetooth he was affixing to his ear. His hair was a mess. She was going to have to remind him to brush it every now and then. "I want to remind you," she murmured.

Jack leant closer, conspiratorially, almost as if he expected her to kiss him. His eyes lowered and his mouth opened a little. "Remind me of what?"

Gwen grabbed what used to be her arm, squeezing the wound. Jack pulled away sharply and glared at her. "This," she said. "Remember that the body you're in right now isn't immortal, Jack. It may not be the indestructible thing that you're used to, but I'm fond of it." She shrugged, dropping his arm. "Just something to remember if we have to go out like this."

Jack rubbed his arm lightly, eyes looking elsewhere. "I'd forgotten," he said, and Gwen was still startled to hear such a foreign accent speaking in her voice. Hopefully, it wasn't something she'd have to get used to.

"That's the point," she huffed, and a small part of her was rather pleased that she could manage to make her Jack voice sound rather authoritarian. Jack's eyes glinted in amusement, and she didn't even want to decipher what he was thinking about.

She didn't have to, because there was a shrill alarm, and somewhere in the atrium, Tosh yelped. Owen dashed out of the arbouretum, water gun still in hand.

The alarm was unfamiliar, and by now Gwen had been pretty sure that she knew all the ins and outs of the Hub's security system. But Jack grabbed her hand and yanked her down the catwalk to the cog door. "Contamination source?" he yelled, still dragging Gwen as Ianto brushed past them to hit the controls for the invisible lift. Tosh darted past her and up the stairs, Owen closely at her heels. Ianto was the last out the door. She could hear Myfanwy's screeches as she prepared to sail up and out of the opening in the ceiling.

"The Xarxian body in the autopsy theatre," Tosh said, breathless as they raced up the stairs to the tourist office in time to shoot through just as the last of the security doors slid closed. "Leaked into the ventilation shafts and tripped the alarms." She glanced at the PDA in her hand. "Unknown substance."

Owen sighed and leant against the reception desk. "That alarm is set for a twenty four hour decontamination burst," he said. "No telling just how much of whatever it was we might have breathed in before then." He squirted Gwen with the spray bottle before Ianto took it from him and tossed it in the backroom. "You were digging around inside it," he added, "You feeling all right?"

It took Gwen a few seconds to realise that he meant her. She stopped to breathe deeply and assess. "I'm fine," she said finally, fairly sure that she was telling the truth.

"I sent Myfanwy out the lift," Ianto said as he tidied the scattered leaflets on the counter. "No need to infect her with whatever that was." When Owen rolled his eyes Ianto raised an eyebrow. "You know, if it was some sort of zombie virus or other."

Jack sighed. "For all we know it was the mother of all alien farts."

"Yeah, let's bring this back to perspective," Owen replied, shoving off from the counter and heading for the door. He peeked out the window. "Can someone close the lift now?"

Gwen looked at Jack, who reached out for her wrist, opened the strap on it, and pressed a few buttons. Then he unbuckled the strap and placed it on his own. Even at the smallest setting, it spun around on his arm like a bangle. "Oh geez, Gwen, you're tiny," he muttered, before breaking into a grin. "Except for these-"

Gwen stopped him before he could grab his breasts, grimacing. "Don't."

Ianto sighed and leant on the counter. "So, what do we do now?"

Owen looked at Tosh, who shrugged. "Contamination is a little different from the security lockdown. I could override it, but, I'll be honest." She looked straight at Gwen, who was fairly sure that she wanted to address Jack. "We don't want to risk contaminating the outside world until we know what was in...what?"

Gwen pointed to her body, and Jack tried his best to look commandeering. He was a little shorter than usual, and the effect was slightly comical. Gwen wondered if she looked this foolish when she tried to be in command or if she was able to pull it off with more grace. She suspected that Jack was relying on gestures and posture that only looked impressive on someone with a great deal more height.

"Well, we're not waiting until two in the morning tomorrow to get back into the Hub," he said sourly. "We'll get a good amount of sleep, and then everyone meet here at fourteen hundred and Tosh will break us in. If I have to I'll go in first."

Gwen opened her mouth to say something but Owen beat her to it. "Go in, possibly to a poisoned area, with Gwen's not-immortal body?"

Jack glanced at her, then at his chest and hung his head, sighing. "No. We'll think of something."

Tosh dumped all of her equipment into one of the tourist center's gift bags and looked sheepish. "I left my purse inside. Does anyone have car keys?"

Owen patted himself down, then nodded. "Right then, Tosh, remind us not to make you drive the getaway car. I'll give you a lift home."

Gwen stuffed her hands into her pockets. Jack had nothing, not even a mobile. Everything was probably in his magic greatcoat pockets. And the keys to her Saab were in her purse, safely stashed in her desk. Some tactical force they were. She was immensely grateful for Ianto, who twirled a small ring of keys on his finger and raised his eyebrows at them both.

"It's a shame we can't just get a hotel room."

Jack grinned as they left the Tourist Office and Ianto locked the door behind them all. Tosh shivered in the evening rain and Gwen realised just how cold it was for April.

"Hey yeah, a hotel room," Jack mused. "Room service, those robes. I could get a massage. Gwen, you're really tense—"

"Of course I'm tense," Gwen spat out. "I'm in a—"

"All of this is moot," Ianto interjected, placing a hand on her shoulder and then withdrawing it immediately. Gwen wondered what he thought when he looked at her and knew that Jack wasn't in there. "Because we spent the last of the surplus budget for the month, and Whitehall has said no more hotel jaunts until next quarter."

Jack waved his hands. "We didn't want to run into ourselves! Where were we supposed to go?"

Ianto shrugged. "I don't think the exchequer quite cares about that, sir."

Owen rolled his shoulders and removed his outer shirt, throwing it over Tosh's shoulders. She gave him grateful mooneyes. "What did we squander our surplus on this time?"

Ianto blinked. "Stab vests for the team."

"Oh. Well then, Right. See all of you tomorrow," Owen mumbled, as they arrived at the cars and split into two groups. Gwen leant against Ianto's very practical car and waited for him to unlock the door. She was damned if she was going to ride in the back seat. Jack and his insufferable cheerfulness could ride in the back. Jack with his much shorter legs. Her sodding legs.

Jack murmured something to Owen as he opened his door, and she heard him chuckle when he got in behind her. Owen rapped on the window and Jack lowered it minutely.

"It's just occurred to me," Owen told Jack, "We had sex."

Jack just snorted.

 

 **TUESDAY**

 _If you get invited to your first orgy, don't just show up nude. That's a common mistake. You have to let nudity 'happen.'_ (Jack Handey)

The sun streamed in the bay window when Ianto stumbled out into the sitting room, rubbing his face with his hands and passing Jack snoring on the sofa, the menu screen to _Tout va bien_ on replay. He'd been watching _Letter to Jane_ again. Ianto turned off the DVD player and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee. He didn't bother to wake Jack; Jack, if he was anything like normal, had only been asleep for about fifteen minutes, and Ianto suspected that he was like himself, since Gwen had slept through what was left of the night, and now was messing about in the shower with her new bits.

Besides, as soon as Ianto started the grinder, Jack would bounce in and offer to--

Oh dear.

"I slept like the dead," Jack said, poking his head around the corner of the kitchenette, his hair horribly askew. "Not that I'm complaining. I haven't slept like that since--" He cocked his head. "Well." He reached a hand into the sweat pants that Ianto had given him, and which were enormous on him, and scratched himself, yawning. Ianto looked away. He wasn't as adept at substituting personalities as he had hoped, and to think that this was Gwen in his kitchenette grasping for anatomy that she didn't have was rather disturbing.

Instead, he dumped a cup of Kenya AA in the grinder and busied himself with cups and water for the pot. "Yeah? Gwen was out like a light until I woke her up." He paused. "Could it be that everyone got a good night's sleep?" He stared off into the distance, until the horrid daisy paper border on the walls was blurry. "Is that even possible?"

"Everything is not so clear. Everything is not so obvious," Jack said, sticking his nose almost into the grinder.

"I'm starting to think that you're actually listening to the film, and not getting off on Godard's accent," Ianto said wryly. He dumped the grounds in the basket and flipped the lid closed.

Jack shrugged. "It's the closest thing you have to _Barbarella_ ," he replied, then snaked his hands around Ianto's waist. Ianto didn't tell him that he'd picked up _Barbarella_ on DVD three weeks ago, and it was hidden in the recesses of his sock drawer, waiting.

Gwen's hands were much smaller and colder than Jack's as they crept underneath the waistband of his pajamas. Ianto had slept in shorts, pajamas and socks, as if every bit of him needed to be covered with Gwen in the bed next to him.

Gwen had been in the bed with him specifically because, according to all three of them, Jack could not be trusted. That was rather unfair; Jack might have been sexually flexible, but he could, occasionally, contrary to popular opinion, keep it in his pants. Jack had stayed on the sofa because he usually didn't need sleep, though Ianto wondered about that, with the body switch and all. Who currently held the prize at the bottom of the cereal box? Gwen, inside Jack's body? Or Jack's immortal spirit, housed in Gwen's usually fragile human shell?

He made a note to discuss it with Owen later.

Ianto pulled the wandering foreign hands from his waistband and sighed. "None of that right now," he murmured, and felt Jack's forehead rest between his shoulderblades. "We have company." He smirked. "It looks like you."

Jack's hands slapped a drum rhythm on Ianto's stomach. "Yeah. One of us should help her out."

Ianto flipped the switch on the coffee maker and turned in the curve of Jack's arms. "Do you think that's quite wise?"

Jack sighed and buried his face into Ianto's chest, his arms tightening, Ianto found himself circling Jack's shoulders and wondering how the hell his life had gotten so fucked up. It was too easy to say 'Oh well, Torchwood, that'll do it,' because a great deal of it _wasn't_ Torchwood, per se. Well. Jack made a snuffling noise into his t-shirt, swaying a bit as they paused there, still sleepy and not quite paying attention to anything in particular, and Ianto simply _understood_ , in one of those moments of tired clarity.

Finally, as the first note of coffee hit the air, Jack pulled away and yawned, smacking Ianto on the hip. "Right then. Gwen's probably freaking out about now." He made a heroic flying gesture with his hands. "Super Jack to the rescue."

Ianto reached up into the cupboard behind him and blindly retrieved a mug. He wasn't moving. He'd be able to hear the screaming from here.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"JACK!" Gwen yelled, reaching down to cover her crotch. Jack rolled his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

"Think about this," he said, his head peeking around the shower curtain. "Never more so than now is it true that you do not have anything I haven't seen before."

Gwen was grumpy and not a little confused at her current state. Firstly, she was _not_ herself, a fact that she didn't feel like she could reiterate enough. Secondly, she was naked and washing a male body she'd _never_ washed before. She was a modern girl. She'd been in the shower and bath loads of times with blokes, mostly Rhys, and she'd even washed them before in a non-sexual 'you wash my back, I'll wash yours' manner. The problem was that a great deal of the time, taking a shower with a man became something _other_ than a shower, and here she was, in the shower with the body of one of them, one that she'd –okay, she could say it in her head, she'd _fantasised_ about Jack. Multiple times. Several times in the shower.

And now she had come full circle. She tried not to think about the body she was in, then, well, not so much. It shouldn't matter, really. She was Gwen Cooper. This was all just a temporary thing. She had resolved to simply _handle it_.

She'd studiously washed her hair, rubbed her face and noted the lack of stubble, scrubbed her back with Ianto's 'loofah on a stick'. She stood in the spray and read the instructions on the tube of facial cleanser that sat in the wire basket at eye level. Finally, there had been no way to ignore it anymore. She'd taken the bar of soap on hand and grimly set out to tackle…her new tackle.

Jack was generous, and she had no plans to tell him that ever. She'd suspected that she never would, he would just imply that she knew how well-endowed he was for the rest of their lives, every time he looked at her, it would be there in the glint of his eyes. _Forever._ Bastard. Gwen'd stared at the head of her cock and wondered what the hell she was supposed to do with her other unexpected development.

There was An Issue: she was amazingly hard and had only been capable of leaning against the tile, clutching the soap and stroking herself curiously at the time Jack had found her. Over the years, Gwen had sometimes wondered what it would feel like to have a penis, especially the part where it was on the _outside_. Well, more than girl bits. And the whole involuntary physical stimulus response was fascinating. She was fairly sure that in the night she'd half-woken from sleep to find herself hard, pressed into the bed, and in one instance, Ianto's back, but he had seemed to be snoring, so she might have rolled over and thanked Jesus that he hadn't woken.

But the reality, which brought her back to this moment, was that she was going to have to do something. It stunned her how much she _didn't_ know about basic male physiology, aside from the fact that she prided herself on being able to use that anatomy quite well, as a participant. For instance, if she ignored it, and softened, would that mean that later she might become aroused more quickly? Could she lessen her chances of an erection later by getting off now? That would beneficial. And yet, possibly erroneous.

Except, there he was, or she was, Jack, peeking around the shower curtain and grinning, hair horribly tangled. Gwen hoped that Jack knew that he was going to have to do something about that. He'd not washed off Gwen's makeup from the night before, and she wondered if he knew about that too. His eyeliner was worn and smeared, and the corners of his eyes had streaks.

"Yeah well, I don't want to—what are you doing?"

Jack had stripped off all his clothes and joined her in the shower. This was like one of her daydream fantasies in reverse, because usually when Jack joined her in the shower, he was in his own body (though she couldn't fail to notice that watching herself naked was not unlike the third person view that came with fantasy sometimes), and oh, by the way, they were usually not in Ianto's flat.

For a second, she wondered if Jack had ever had Ianto up against the shower wall she was leaning against, and her groin responded to the thought. Jack's mouth quirked a little, but he didn't acknowledge it. In fact, he hadn't said anything about it at all.

"Showering. Believe it or not, I'm thinking of Ianto." He snagged the loofah from its hook on the wall and waved it about. "If we use all of his hot water before he has a turn, he _will_ kill us and leave us in the skip outside."

Gwen turned away from him, facing the wall, and suddenly felt more exposed. "This doesn't feel right," she said to the shower curtain and its navy stripes.

"You're telling me. I lose like, six inches in this deal." He grinned lazily. "Well, more than six inches, really." Jack soaped up the loofah as much as one could soap up a loofah and lazily cleaned himself. Gwen, still not remotely comfortable, settled for half turning, facing slightly away from him so that she could see him out of the corner of her eye. Not that she was watching Jack soap up her breasts.

"The last time I was in the body of a woman," Jack said, making conversation, "she was a Swedish sex worker. Had a pair of tits like you wouldn't believe, but she shaved everywhere, and that was a pain in the ass." He paused. "Can you pass me that tube thing from…."

Gwen passed him the facial scrub, then gave up on washing her legs, scrunched like a ball in the corner, lifting her knees up while she stared at the soap bubbles slide down the shower curtain. Instead, she leant against the tile and watched Jack wash her face, only realising as Jack moved towards her blindly that she was going to have to let him use the spray, which she had rather been blocking since he'd gotten in there.

Gwen took Jack's hand and slid past him in the shower, so that he could stand under the spray. Ianto's shower was much longer than it was wide, though, and the front of her brushed against Jack's rear, _her_ rear, when he moved by. Jack hummed tunelessly as he rinsed his face and reached for the shampoo.

"Do you ever get used to it?" she asked. It was better when his eyes were closed and he couldn't see her. She might have even felt like having a heart-to-heart if he had only remained on the other side of the shower curtain.

Jack shrugged. "No. And would you want to? I think that the spirit recognises that it's not in the right place, and that's one of the main reasons you feel funny. Itchy." He opened his eyes and closed them quickly. "Or, _ow_. Soapy."

Gwen took advantage of Jack's closed eyes to wash the rest of herself, not concerned anymore with her erection or anything else. She was mostly just concerned with getting out of the vicinity of Jack, naked in her body and not seeming to mind. He even acted _happy_ about it.

"The machine," she said, reaching over him to redirect the spray towards her in the back of the shower. "It didn't do this because of who we are, right? It did this because we both touched it."

"The machine isn't sentient. It's a machine. A brilliant, complex, _fucked up_ alien machine," Jack answered. He ducked under the spray and sighed in the heat. "Gwen, I know we don't always see eye to eye, but I like to think that we can manage our relationship without drastic measures." His mouth quirked in a grin. "And if we do need drastic measures, I would prefer Jell-o wrestling. Ianto can referee."

Gwen grunted, because she didn't have a reply except to argue with him, and he was using humour to answer a complicated question. On the other hand, he'd pretty much answered it, and she didn't even have to look into his eyes to know that he meant it. She reached for the shower curtain but was surprised when his hand grabbed her wrist. It was small and pale against her own current arm, and she had to blink at it, because when she looked, all she could think was that she knew what that felt like in the reverse, his skin under her hand, not his arm under her skin.

Jack blinked, and his eyes looked huge. "Don't take this the wrong way," he mumbled, "Because it's not like I actually spend a lot of time making faces in the mirror. Hard to believe, I know."

Gwen rolled her eyes, but she didn't move away. "Jack—"

"But I'm not sure I have ever looked as freaked as you do now." Gwen opened her mouth to speak, but Jack glanced away. And then, almost too soft. "It's okay to be scared, because I'm not okay either."

And then he was on her, which was odd because, in all truth, she could have taken him so easily, even knowing half of the fighting moves he knew, even though he was smaller and more experienced, there were some things that brute strength was good for, and tackling and subduing smaller people was one of them.

Jack licked a bit at her chest. Gwen's brain wasn't fusing thoughts together very well, and her cock was rigid, pressed against Jack's belly. "I think, in my log, I'm going to refer to this as 'The Gwen Cooper Experience'," Jack said, reaching his hands up to run along her neck. Gwen sucked in a breath. "Like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Just as hallucinogenic in ways, but completely sober."

She wanted to say something. She had a speech planned for this moment, this moment that she had anticipated just for this occasion, the moment when Jack might want to take advantage of his own body, which, she had to admit, was probably a pretty big draw. Jack pressed her into the tile, and his tongue circled one of her nipples and she still couldn't bring herself to touch him, her, or whatever because she was still very aware that it was her body that was grinding against her. And that might have gone over well in the ninetieth century or wherever Jack said he was from this week, but to a twenty-first century lass it was still rather odd.

"I don't think that this—" she began.

"You know, just once, you can say you were thinking with your John Thomas," Jack whispered into the hollow of her ear. "Trust me, it's really easy to do, and very rarely is it as good an excuse as this time."

"But I—"

Her hands started to reach for Jack's shoulders, but Jack grabbed her cock and squeezed, and her feet almost went out from under her. She slammed her eyes shut and let him pump her, his other hand pulling her neck down so that he could whisper in her ear. "The fact of the matter is that I'm pretty sure I know what you might like, because well, I have some experience. And I've kind of always wanted to get myself off. You know. Like this."

"Oh." Gwen pressed her shoulders into the tiles and threw her head back. She didn't want to think about the fact that Jack was making a chipper commentary in her voice, albeit lacking in an accent, but still very much hers, like she was narrating a documentary. One of her hands grasped the towel bar and the other one scrabbled at her side. Jack's fingers played with her balls, his balls, oh Jesus this was confusing.

"I was thinking about this, and we have a novelty thing going on here," Jack purred, taking her free hand and lifting it to his breast. She closed on it convulsively and he squeaked a little when her fingers pinched the nipple. "You do have great tits Gwen, I wasn't joking about that." And he released he hand so that he could pull her down by the back of the neck, his mouth so close to hers. "I bet you give great tongue."

Gwen felt her eyes widen even more than she would have thought when Jack changed his rhythm on her cock, and the shock was enough to press their mouths together, and oh dear, that was lovely. Jack opened his lips, her lips, and his tongue was hot and insistent, his thin fingers curved about the back of her head, and part of her wondered in her mind (the ten percent that wasn't focused below her waist), if she was this good a kisser in her own body as Jack was in her body. Lords, that would be depressing if she wasn't.

Jack skidded his lips up to her ear and bit there, pulling on the lobe. His hand changed the movement on her cock and sped up. "Later, when the shock has worn off, and you have had a larger dose of 'The Jack Harkness Experience,'" he whispered, "you can show me what you've learned through independent study."

Gwen came on his chest. Her chest. Oh Jesus.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh waved to them cheerily from the Plass, and Jack waved back, grinning. Gwen slouched in her borrowed leather coat and Ianto just looked on blandly as Owen's car sped past them and to the parking area, some sort of heavy metal music blaring even though the closed windows. He looked to be very grumpy, and Tosh wasn't excited about a whole day (or half-day, as it was already afternoon, and hopefully they wouldn't have to stay late. Oh, who was she kidding?) of Owen complaining about decontamination and unsafe workplace practices. The last time they'd had a decontamination shutdown, he'd bitched at her the whole day afterwards, as if it had been her fault that the alien tech she had been working on had a gaseous trigger switch.

Sometimes she missed Suzie; she always put Owen in his place, even if they were screwing on the side. Ianto was a fair replacement as far as passively-aggressively messing with Owen's head, but sometimes he needed a good ear cuffing.

Tosh hefted the bag of pasties in her hand and waved it about. Jack (in Gwen's body, wow, how odd was it that Tosh had no problems just _seeing_ him in there? It was virtually obvious from the posture and the spring in his step.) made what she liked to call his 'jolly food face' and clapped his hands once. Jack was her partner in bad pasties.

"Hullo!" she chirped when they were within earshot. She already had good news. Well, and pasties. Gwen glanced out at the bay and seemed to shrink further into the collar of her coat. Ianto gave her a brief smile and shook his head as he approached the front door of the Tourist Centre and found it already open. "I took the liberty of going in and overriding the lock down," she added hastily. "After the last time I made a few modifications to make it easier."

She proffered the open bag, and Jack dug his hand in, pulling out a still-warm pasty and taking a big bite. "Is that wise? Did I approve that?" It was easy to remember who was in which body when they ate. Gwen never talked with her mouth full. Jack grinned and swallowed. "Toshiko, are you planning a coup?"

Owen shuffled up to their group and followed them into the darkened Tourist Centre. Ianto flipped the lights and they stood there, in front of the open door to the Hub. No one seemed particularly eager to be the first in.

"Readings say that it's all right," Tosh said into the silence. She placed both her hands around the pasty bag; her fingers were cold.

Jack hung back a little. If things hadn't already been crazy, she would have been worried. Jack was usually the first one to charge in where angels feared to tread, but someone (possibly Gwen, probably Ianto) had managed to drill into his skull that the body he was in wasn't, in all likelihood, going to recover from toxic gas. Gwen, for her part, looked at them all in turn, mouth fishing for something to say. Tosh didn't blame her; she still wouldn't be too eager to be the guinea pig.

Owen rolled his eyes. "Oh for fuck's sake," he mumbled, then reached under the counter and pulled out a small box. "Gas masks, remember?" He tossed one to each of them and Tosh felt somewhat sheepish. Of course, the gas masks. Hers was dusty.

There was some fumbling and general confusion about the gas masks until Jack checked them all over (in addition to bitching about how they'd all have to drill with masks again once this was all over), and, with Ianto leading the way, they all trooped down into the Hub. The hallway seemed to be in good form, but then again, with gas, it was hard to tell. Tosh looked at her exposed hands and rolled the top of her closed pasty bag even tighter. She could hear her breath though the mask, and the goggles cost her peripheral vision. All in all, an irritating beginning to the day, and it wasn't even the beginning, though she suspected that they would be here late into the night to make up for the lost time.

The cog hatch released and the alarms went off as usual, and Ianto peered into the room before Owen pushed him and he spun for a moment, raising his hands in questioning, but if he made a face the mask obscured it. He opened the invisible lift and they watched Myfanwy zoom back into the opening before it had even slid completely aside. Poor thing had been out all night.

Tosh had to remind herself that Myfanwy was a pterodon and not some pitiful cat. In fact, odds were she'd _eaten_ someone's cat last night.

Her monitors were still on, and Tosh called up all the ventilation readings on the interior of the Hub. Jack leant against her shoulder and she could hear his breathing. "Everything is normal. Oxygen, carbon dioxide levels, no foreign substances above average."

"All right then," Gwen said, and they all watched, a little suspenseful, as she yanked off her mask and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. "It's fine. I'm fine."

They peeled their masks off tentatively, but Owen kept his on as he made his way down to the autopsy theatre and yanked a series of heavy black tarps from one of his lower cabinets. "One of you has to help me get this fucking time bomb out of my sight," he called. "Gwen! Man up!"

Gwen glanced at Jack and Ianto, then down at the autopsy theatre. Jack shrugged his shoulders and looked at Ianto, who busied himself at a console, fingers racing as quickly as Tosh's. It was all fine and good that the sensors said they were in the clear, and they obviously weren't suffocating or dying from poison, but there was no telling how far the toxin had got in the ventilation system, and there were things living in some of the lower levels that they wouldn't want to have to say goodbye to. At least, that was what Tosh assumed. She tried not to go down to the lower levels anymore.

Jack took the steps to his office. "You heard the good doctor," he told Gwen. "Use that Olympian physique and haul that shit out of here."

Ianto looked up, stared off into space, his brow furrowing in confusion. He caught Tosh's eye and mouthed the words _Olympian physique?_ at her. She shrugged. Sometimes she ignored Jack. This was one of those times. At least he hadn't absconded with her pasty bag.

Gwen looked at Tosh, who waved her paper bag. "I have a pasty for you," she said helpfully. Gwen rolled her eyes but shrugged off her coat and grinned when Tosh held out the bag to her. She took one and set it on her coat at her desk before dusting off her hands and heading for the autopsy theatre, from where Owen was apparently already trying to move the body to the incinerator chute, because there was a more than normal amount of cursing floating out of the recessed area.

"All the water from the Hub Tub has been drained and settled into one of the storage reservoirs underground," Ianto said from what was fast becoming known as his station. Tosh rather liked that Ianto had a workspace down there with them. "Too soon to know if there's anything in it, but better to be safe than sorry." He glanced down at the pool around the water tower.

"Hub Tub?" she asked.

Ianto shrugged but didn't elucidate. Instead he checked a few more readings. "The fresh water is contaminant-free. Well, as contaminant-free as Bay water can be."

"Oh Jesus!" Gwen shouted. "That's disgusting!"

"Watch it, Gwen, that shite is corrosive!"

Ianto rolled his eyes at Tosh and they both smirked. She liked being the tech geek, and also one of the smaller ones. It meant that she got out of a lot of unsavoury heavy lifting, and that suited her just fine; her boots were Prada.

"Oi! That hurts!"

"Then stop lifting with—"

"Oh bollocks!"

There was a thud and then the sound of a large carcass bouncing in freefall down the sheet metal duct that led to the incinerator room. Silence reigned for a few seconds until Owen broke it with a string of curses. "We have a sodding lift!"

Gwen wasn't in the mood, probably because her chest was covered in blue congealed blood, Tosh noted as she watched Jack's form storm up out of the autopsy bay, unbuttoning the shirt on the way towards Jack's office. Owen followed her up out of the theatre and stood there, trying to hold a smile back until Gwen disappeared.

Ianto sighed. "I hate it when you do that," he moaned. "It splatters everywhere."

Owen shrugged and pointed a finger at the office above. " _She_ did it, not me." He wiped his hands with a towel and tossed it in a bin, possibly as a concession to Ianto, who watched his rubbish disposal methods like a hawk.

Tosh left her station and settled on the sofa for a few moments to eat her admittedly horrible lunch; the next few hours were going to be busy, and she understood that bad pasties were only good when they were warm, at least. Once they were cold they became bad-bad pasties, dough hard as a rock and filling too solid and unsettling.

Jack left his office, talking a mile a minute on his mobile. Tosh was a little bit surprised that he'd attempted to conduct any business in his current body, but then again, Jack (and a great deal of UNIT and other places) had collective experience with this kind of thing. She supposed that if Jack had the right clearances, then they'd accept that he was who he said he was. He probably had special clearances just to identify himself in this sort of situation. Tosh wished they had them too; that could easily have been her walking about in someone else's body.

She didn't look at Ianto for a few seconds until her brain cleared that thought.

Jack finished his call to someone named 'Neil' and flipped the phone closed, attempting to shove it in the front of Gwen's jeans and discovering that nothing fit in the front pockets of skintight jeans. Tosh almost laughed. Instead, he tossed the phone to Ianto, who caught it and slipped it absentmindedly into his suitcoat pocket.

"Colonel Storr doesn't believe that I'm me," Jack said, grimacing, but still managing to look rather amused. "I tried to explain, but he apparently doesn't want to hear about our 'wonky Torchwood business' today." He leant against the rails to the autopsy theatre and crossed his arms. "I was going to get into it with him and then I realized, I just don't care." He smiled. "Maybe this means that UNIT will stop calling."

Tosh swallowed a bite of pasty. "We could never be that lucky." She had no love for UNIT.

Jack smiled at her, and they shared something like a secret joke. It wasn't funny, it would never be funny, but somehow the common frame of reference they shared made it seem less frightening. "You're right, of course," he said. "It's not like we have pressing business with them right now anyway. Everything can keep until our…nineteen Geelucks is up."

Tosh took a bite of pasty and watched Owen shrug on his medical coat and saunter up to his station. He dropped into his seat, which rolled back a few inches with the impact. Then he leant forward, grabbed the frame of the monitor and peered at it, tapping a few keys, still staring.

"All the Weevils are dead." Owen sat back in his chair and grunted. "Well, all two of the ones we have, that is."

"What?" Tosh dumped her lunch on the table and raced over to her workstation, nearly falling over Jack to bring up the footage. Ianto left the coffee station and peered over their shoulders.

"No, not Janet," Ianto said. "I knew her well. A Weevil of infinite--"

Jack backed into Ianto and smacked him in the stomach lightly. Tosh smirked.

Owen sighed. "I'm sorry to disappoint. Janet has been tagged and released for a week. Did it myself." He frowned. "I did it early too. I wonder if I have a sixth sense about this shite."

Ianto shoved his hands in his pockets. "Is it wrong to say that I don't feel too badly?" he mused aloud.

Jack gave him a look at closely resembled one of Gwen's disapproving and disappointed stares.

Gwen came out of Jack's office, frowning. "Jack, do you own any shirts that aren't blue?"

"No," Ianto answered her as he returned to the kitchenette.

Jack continued to share at Tosh's monitor. Something was whirring in his head, but, as usual, it would become apparent when he chose to share. She had learned over the years to just let Jack percolate on his own and then say what he wanted when he was ready instead of pressing him for answers. Well, unless the world was ending. She sincerely hoped that the world wasn't ending.

Gwen peered over Jack's shoulders. "Are those the cells? What's wrong with them?"

Owen rolled his eyes. "Our resident Weevils below have snuffed it." When Gwen turned that disapproving stare on him (it looked so different in Jack's body, but it was unmistakable), he shrugged. "I'm sorry," he amended, a hand on his chest in mock sorrow. "They've passed on. Funeral services are Thursday."

Tosh always wondered about Owen and the Weevils. Even before the situation with Mark Lynch and the fighting ring, Owen seemed to be fascinated by them in a grotesque way. More than once he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't tell anyone about them, and had in fact written several papers on them for the Torchwood archives. Sometimes when he was gone for the night and she had nothing better to do, Tosh looked them up and read them (she hadn't read them all. There were at least eight and she didn't have that much free time.) Owen, for all his jackassery and rudeness, was an exceptional doctor, and he treated medical research the same way he approached all areas of his job. His papers were well-researched, cited, detailed and footnoted. His charts and graphs were impeccable.

Tosh treated her scholarly work for the Torchwood archives much the same way. Some day she would be dead, but parts of her, of what she did, would remain in the archives, papers and research and plans and projects that all bore her name: Toshiko Sato, Head Technician, Torchwood Three.

Jack backed away from the monitors and sighed. "Well, that's that. We're going to need that cleaned out, Owen." He shrugged. "No telling when we'll need the cells again." He frowned. "Wear masks. The ventilation down there isn't as good as it is up here, and I don't want to have to clear you out, too."

It was lighthearted, but Tosh knew better. Jack sauntered away towards the kitchenette.

Gwen sighed. "I hope they didn't suffer," she said, and Tosh wondered if Owen was going to make fun of her. He didn't. Tosh had to agree with her. They were monsters, of a fashion, creatures pulled from their homes, wherever that was, and deposited in a foreign world, where they were occasionally trapped and shoved into a cell and studied. Then out of the blue, they suffocated, or were poisoned, or whatever. She didn't know what had done them in, and she wasn't about to look up the CCTV footage to find out. Owen would do it later. It was his job, after all.

"It's a shame you changed your clothes, Gwen," Owen said, standing and stretching. "Because I'm going to need you to help clean up that mess." He nodded towards the cells on the monitor. Ianto flipped the steam wand open and a hissing noise covered any number of whispers from the café station. Who knew what was going on over there? Tosh glanced over, but Ianto was by himself, trying to look innocent and very very busy.

"I thought Ianto…." Gwen drifted off and shrugged. "Oh, all right then." She headed for the vaults with a resigned sigh.

"I would have helped you," Ianto said in a low voice.

"Oh come on, she never has to help." Owen smiled. "You know, women's lib and all that rot."

Jack shook his head as he materialised from the other side of the water tower. "When she figures out that you're taking the piss, you're going to be in trouble."

Owen fired a finger gun at Ianto. "So I expect excellent coffee for that, mate," he replied as he followed Gwen down into the passage that led to the vaults. Ianto offered him a mock salute and spun Owen's mug on one finger.

"Really, though, Ianto," Tosh said when she accepted her coffee a few minutes later, "Hub Tub?"

Ianto smiled. "Sometimes I get bored."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen opened the file as he walked to Jack's desk. "Well, the—" he stopped, cocking his head at the speakers. "Are you listening to the Ramones?"

Jack's pen stabbed mercilessly at the tablet in front of him and he didn't look up. "Yes," he grated out.

Ianto glanced up from the computer monitor. "Jack lost a bet," he deadpanned, then resumed typing.

No explanation was forthcoming. Owen shrugged. "Anyway, I found our toxin. It's an aggregate of the tea in the Xarxian's…" he scrambled for a word. "Storage pouch in the abdomen and a natural chemical from the body. I tried to isolate the chemical in the tea, and I think it's, well, uhm." He shuffled the papers and laid the top one on Jack's desk.

Ianto rolled away from the monitor and peered over Jack's diminutive shoulder. "1, 3, 7-trimethylxanthine," he said, then glanced up. "You mean—"

Owen snorted. "Good old C8H10—"

"Caffeine?" Jack said, a smirk on his face. "Mom always said too much of that would kill you."

Ianto shook his head and returned to the computer. "I think you mean stunt your growth."

Jack handed the papers back to Owen. "No, that's twenty-first century claptrap." Owen didn't bother telling them both to shut the hell up so that he could finish. He'd seen the Jack and Ianto show, with the right bodies, even, and he wasn't in the mood.

"So the caffeine combined with the chemical element in the Xarxian cavity, made some sort of gas, which, I should mention, is pretty fucking toxic, and I'm betting it made our body down there _very_ ill."

Jack sat back and steepled his fingers. "So, you're saying that caffeine is what's killing our Xarxian visitors?" He glanced back at Ianto. "Told you."

Owen raised an eyebrow and wondered when Ianto would be ordering dinner for them. He fancied Pad Thai. "You know," he said, "It could be killing them. It could be what's driving them mad, as well. It'd be worth finding out if the other bodies we brought in have caffeine in them. I'll admit that I wasn't looking." He shrugged. "Can't find something if you don't know you're looking for it," he said, feeling strangely like a fortune cookie.

Maybe he wanted Chinese instead.

He stopped on his way out the door. "What do Xarxians eat, Jack?"

Jack glanced up from a mountain of paperwork distractedly. "They're herbivores, so, you know, plants, nuts, fruit. Why?"

Owen checked his files again. "Ours have large quantities of meat in the stomachs." He checked again. "Meat, restaurant skip rubbish, half eaten pasties swallowed whole, you know. Any reason? If they're as smart as we are, wouldn't they have sussed out the difference between flesh and flora?"

"Fauna," Ianto corrected. "Fauna and flora."

Jack grinned. "Somewhere out there is a set of sexy twins named that."

"Intriguing. And yet, you evade the question."

"Not evade. Just don't know the answer." Jack leant forward and clasped his hands, resting his chin on them. "What do you think, Mister Harper?"

Sometimes, when Jack got like this, Owen felt like he was back in school, being led into some sort of Socratic trap in which he would reveal his thundering ignorance. Nothing for it, though, but to push onward. He was the medical expert here, and he was damn well going to earn his paycheque. "I think I'd be able to figure it out," he said, "plants and flesh aren't similar, unless there's something I don't know about their home planet. They really should know."

Jack smiled and leant back into his chair, sticking Gwen's breasts at full attention. Damn. Owen and Gwen weren't on anymore, but sometimes when he looked at her, he still saw her naked body on his, her face sweaty, hair sticking to her neck.

"Good answer," Jack said, and Owen was able to snap out of the mental image. "I agree. Could the caffeine toxin thing be messing with their heads?"

 _That_ Owen could answer. "Absolutely. Give me more time with the first two and I'll have an answer by supper."

Ianto closed the file he'd been working on and leant back into his chair, hands behind his head. "On that note, you pick dinner."

Ah, Ianto still owed him for earlier. Owen smiled to himself. He liked when Ianto owed him; it increased the quality of his coffee and those snacks he had stashed in his desk magically stocked themselves. And of course, "I'm thinking Chinese."

Ianto nodded and pushed away from the desk. "I'm thinking excellent choice, Doctor."

Jack sighed. Jesus, did his face look like Gwen's. Well alright, it _was_ Gwen's, but most of the time, from what Owen had been able to tell so far, the facial expressions were completely different. Even the posture was different. Jack stood at attention a great deal more often than he had ever noticed; he wasn't sure if it was to compensate for Gwen's shorter stature, or if it was something he always did and they never noticed because he was fucking tall, anyway.

"Don't I get a vote?"

Ianto turned his chair on the rollers minutely to regard Jack. "Do you ever care?"

Owen watched Jack consider for a second. "No. No I don't."

Ianto was smug. "Sorted."

Owen waved his folder and turned to go. "I'm off for real work. Call me when General Tso gets here."

As he left, a new song started, and he heard the volume rise. "This is my favorite," Ianto said.

"They all seem to be your 'favorite'," Jack noted dryly.

"They are today," Ianto chirped.

Owen smirked and double-timed down the steps before 'Blitzkreig Bop' could get stuck in his head for the rest of the night.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh loved the place Ianto got Chinese from, and that he always ordered her wor shu duck with extra vegetables and szechuan peppercorns. He was considerate like that; sometimes she looked at him with the 'boyfriend' eye, when no one was watching her. It wasn't even that he was _somethingsomething_ Jack, or that he was a co-worker, or that he was actually a good bit younger than she was, though all of those things combined of course made him off limits (most likely the first, and not the latter two, or she wouldn't have a thing for Owen, or have had a thing for Tommy). It was that in the moments in which Ianto wasn't bringing her coffee, or helping her rewire something alien, or ordering her food just the way she liked, she sometimes saw his face when he didn't think anyone was looking, and it scared her a little.

She didn't like to dwell, because for all she knew he had a twinge in his back or something. But sometimes Ianto looked like he was in _pain_ , and sometimes he looked as if he was barely keeping himself together. Tosh knew what that was like. And it wasn't because of Lisa, as it had been when she'd stumbled upon his depressed thoughts. This was something deeper, something that was all his, and had been long before he'd joined even Torchwood One, she suspected.

That didn't stop her from placing him in a few starring roles in her bedroom. God, who wouldn't?

"Team briefing over Chinese. Excellent." Jack picked up his fork and waved it about like a conductor's baton. "Team: brief me."

Owen speared one of the community dumplings with his fork. "Our Xarxians all had mass quantities of meat in their stomachs, but only the one from last night had caffeine in its system." He glanced at Jack. "So our hypothesis about that being what has driven them feral is out the window. It could be the meat, though." He bit into the dumpling and sighed, chewing before he spoke again. Tosh liked that Owen didn't talk with his mouth full. She wondered if that was something he had always done, or if someone, somewhere had drilled that into him.

" _I_ think that's what's doing it. You see it in rats all the time. Cattle that are fed meat byproducts going feral. Eating things that aren't meant for them to eat. Doesn't explain why they're eating it in the first place, though. It's not as if the places they're scavenging have a shortage of roughage." He smiled. "Most people don't eat their veg."

Tosh stabbed at her stir-fried carrots and ate one. Owen gave her his 'go to the head of the class' face.

Jack hmmed and chewed noisily. "Okay then, feral Xarxians. Tosh, any chance we know if there are any more of them out there?"

Tosh set her fork down and wiped her mouth with a serviette. "I've been working on that. There were about fifteen rift spikes the week before the Xarxians began showing up on our radar." Meaning when they had first seen them. "Five of those were false alarms, nothing coming through, and three of them were harmless. Two were blank retrieves," he glanced at Jack at that. It was a term he had given her, and she used, but she didn't know what it meant. Jack never brought anything back from those trips, but he never said anything about anything coming through. He didn't say that _nothing_ came through, just 'blank retrievals.' One of these days she would know what that meant.

"That leaves five different times the rift dumped something, then," Jack finished for her. "One of those was that sentient Venus flytrap," he added, and Owen shuddered. The poisonous plant with the tendrils hadn't made any of them happy. "The other four could be our four Xarxians, or fifteen of them, or ninety of them. The first one could have been our Xarxians and the other three some something else." He shrugged and dug his fork into his dish. "Comforting."

Tosh nodded. "I generally have the four spikes hammered down, but the rift hasn't been the same since we, well since it opened." She tried not to look guilty, because she'd been a part of that, and it wasn't something she wanted to throw in everyone's faces. They still hadn't healed from that, not completely. It was still in the scabby stage. She busied herself with her duck and took a long swallow of water.

Ianto cocked his head and cleared his throat. "Well, the new program works at locating the rift spikes, right? I mean, just because it's wonky doesn't mean that we can't pinpoint the locations. It simply has to read multiple locations of the rift opening to triangulate a signal." He smiled at her and she beamed; oh it was a shame he was taken.

Owen opened another beer against the table and the bottle cap flipped up into her food. She pulled it out with distaste and tossed it at him. "You're a prat."

Owen sipped from his beer. "Guilty."

"There are more Xarxians than the ones we've managed to catch," Gwen said, tearing open an eggroll and eating the inside. "Last night there were at least six sightings in Bute Park. One bloke imagines that an alien with a big tongue attacked him. Thing nearly took his face off. On the other hand, he'd just come from watching the footie match down at the local pub, and he'd had well, more than a few, so the police are writing it off."

Tosh grinned. "Sometimes I think beer saves us a great deal of trouble."

Gwen shrugged. "I know I heard all manner of things when I was a cop." She smiled. "We blamed most of them on drugs and alcohol."

Jack saluted her with his water. "From the mouths of babes," he said, winking. Owen snorted his beer into his nose, and Gwen patted him on the back until he swallowed and laughed into his take-away dish. Tosh wasn't sure what was so funny, anyway.

"All right then," Jack said after the crisis was averted, "we have some searching to do. Those things need to be pulled in. Can we monitor the areas where they were last seen and find them that way?"

Tosh sighed. "Yes." She wished they had told her this earlier. She could have set the computers on that ages ago, and they'd have pinpointed locations already. This night felt like a huge case of 'hurry up and wait.' "Give me some time."

Jack rolled his shoulders as if he was tired and sore; maybe he was. Maybe just being in Gwen's body was wearing on him. She glanced at Gwen, but then again, Gwen just looked uncomfortable. It was strange to watch Jack's body, which usually attacked the food in front of him with a vengeance, merely pick at a plate full of Happy Family. Gwen's fingers danced over the eggroll she was still dissecting (Gwen never ate the outsides of the eggroll, just the insides), as if her fingers were just too big to take it apart the way she normally did.

She didn't really have any idea what she'd do if she switched bodies with someone. With her luck, it would be Myfanwy or, heaven help her, Owen. She was less upset at the idea of being in Owen's body than the idea of Owen walking about in her skin. Did that bother Gwen at all? Jack seemed unfazed by the whole thing. Did it unnerve her just looking at him?

Tosh shoved her broccoli about on her plate. Would Gwen want to talk? They were, as the only females there, partners in something else, in, what would she call it? Tosh wasn't sentimental enough to call it 'sisterhood,' because that was just pretentious. But they were in what was, if one looked at the current make up of Torchwood Three (Oh hell, all Torchwood, now), a boys' club, a stereotypically male realm of aliens and guns and fast cars, and, if she was being honest with herself, sexually compromising situations from which females always seemed to emerge worse for wear. She and Gwen had formed a sort of bond, not one grounded in traditionally female activities, per se, but one nonetheless that seemed to be related to their gender. It was one of the things she liked about Gwen. And one of the reasons that she was glad that Gwen wasn't more like Suzie.

Tosh tried not to think about Suzie, because she just felt guilty most of the time. And guilty about the wrong things, she was fairly sure.

"Rhys called," Gwen said finally into her glass. "Wants to meet me for a drink."

Owen snorted. "Like a date; how sweet. Didn't know he fancied the other side." Gwen hit his arm and he rolled his eyes. "Look, you _have_ to stop doing that, or I'm going to file some sort of claim."

Ianto glanced up from his take-away. "Claim denied." Owen flipped him a V.

"Anyway, so, unless there's something pressing, I'm going to see him." She shrugged. "Just to see how it goes." She looked at Jack. "He has a bag of things for you." Before he could even open his mouth she held up a hand. "I told him no lingerie."

Jack laughed outright, and Tosh snorted into her duck. It _was_ rather funny. "Hey, watch this—" Jack took a swig of water, stuck the tip of his tongue out, and spit water through the gap in Gwen's teeth. It arced over the table.

"Jack!" Gwen said, eyes wide in shock. Owen groaned and shielded his head and dumplings. Tosh hoped that he wouldn't turn towards her.

Jack grinned. "Man, Gwen, that's great. If I were you, I'd do that all the time. Fun at parties."

Ianto tapped his chopsticks ponderously against his takeaway container. "I don't know what's more in question here," he mused, "your idea of fun or your definition of a party."

Jack spit water at him.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Gwen looked out over the bar, her drink forgotten in her hand. Part of her was rather glad that it was brisk, because that meant that she could hide inside the greatcoat. The rest of her was sure that no matter what she wore, people would still stare at her. She wondered if they could sense that something was wrong with her.

She tried to concentrate on other things that weren't her obsession about being too conspicuous: the bad version of 'Molly' coming from the speakers, the rugby game on the screens overhead, the gaggle of ladies obviously on hen night in the corner, waving about what looked like boxes of sex toys.

A very lovely girl glanced at her and smiled; then she seemed to see Rhys next to Gwen and made a disappointed face. Oh. _Oh._ She smirked in spite of herself, then winked at the girl. It wasn't as if she ever had to _see_ her again; after the next few days she would be Jack's possible future problem. He might even thank her.

Ianto might thank her too. There was a twisted and delightful thought.

Rhys sighed, and Gwen refocused on him. "What?"

His grin was wry and not a little self-deprecating. "I always thought, well, that I'd _enjoy_ it when beautiful girls gave you the eye." He smiled wanly. "I just didn't think this would be the reason."

She didn't have anything to say to that, because normally she would have hit him in the arm, and the past two times she'd done that to Owen, he'd looked genuinely uncomfortable. Gwen didn't think it would be worth it to test her own strength. She didn't _want_ to get used to this body for a multitude of reasons.

Rhys was taking this rather well. He'd met her at the tourist centre and handed her a bag, which she had deposited on the counter for Ianto to retrieve, and they'd beat a hasty retreat, mostly because while she thought Jack would be tactful enough to stay out of sight, she wasn't a hundred percent sure, and sometimes he pressed buttons that shouldn't be pressed. Rhys had wanted a few reassurances that she was indeed herself, and so she told him a few scandalous things that only the two of them would know, and he'd silenced her with a wave of his hand and closed eyes. She wondered if she should have stayed away from the sex secrets; sure, they were the most secure, but she wondered what she sounded like, this foreign man, telling Rhys all of his hidden sexual behaviours. That had to be…she had immediately felt sorry about it.

So here they were, several pints of bitter and a pale ale later, sitting at the bar, looking for the entire world like two men waiting for their girls. The very thought made Gwen smile. She even wondered what her girl would look like, if she were to sail through the door.

"So this machine," Rhys said, leaning on the bar and putting his feet on the rails below, "you know how to work it, right?"

She drank heavily. "Yeah. It has a standard cycle." She hoped that she looked apologetic. "We were just standing there and then we both touched it." When he glanced at her, she smiled, but she could feel that it was weak. "Okay, we were arguing over _not_ touching it. And then we…touched it."

Rhys snorted. "You two are horrible. Bet you fight like cats."

Gwen shrugged. That was hard to deny some days.

"So, Jack and his man Friday respecting your body? No romps about the secret base?"

Gwen shuddered. "I hope not." Then again, "I didn't say that they _couldn't_. Truth? It hasn't come up." When he shook his head, she frowned at him. "We've been busy. There are aliens to catch and all."

It was true. They still had a problem with the Xarxians that were roaming about, possibly rabid, and then there was the poison in the Hub, that seemed to have dissipated, but was a mystery, and of course, there was the issue of Jack and Gwen being in different bodies, which, the more she thought about it, seemed like a mere inconvenience. As if it could have happened at any time.

But it wasn't coincidence; the tech had come _out_ of one of the Xarxians, and that led her to wonder just how and where it had swallowed that bit of tech. Something about that thought teased something in her mind, but it was too far away, too incoherent, for her to connect it into something comprehendible.

The bartender switched over to BBC Wales, and she was grateful, because it was distracting. The music, unfortunately, was not so forgiving: it was a bad cover of Lady Marmalade. Gwen wrapped her hand about her glass and held it up to the light. She noticed that her fingers, large as they were, were rather nice, long. She liked the nails, as if Jack maintained them. She couldn't imagine him getting a manicure.

"Have you eaten?" Rhys said. "We could go get a curry."

Gwen shut her eyes. What she hadn't anticipated, what no one could have ever anticipated, was that things would taste different. Oh, not completely, in a foreign way, as if she would eat a strawberry and it would taste like cheese, but today, everything, from the coffee to the pasty at lunch to her supper, tasted off, as if it was good, but not what she wanted. She wondered what she would think if she tried some of Jack's favored foods. It occurred to her that she had no idea what Jack preferred, other than the occasional bad pasty with Tosh, and Ianto's coffee, which they all loved anyway.

"I don't think I can eat," she decided. "I already ate anyway." She shrugged. "Earlier."

Rhys shook his head. "What's it feel like, then?"

Gwen turned to face him a little and he recoiled, not a lot, not enough that she would have even called it a recoil if she had been a casual observer, except that she knew better; tonight—no quick moves in front of Rhys.

"I don't know," she told him. "That sounds ridiculous, but it's the same and not the same. I mean," she rolled her eyes, "obviously not the same, but everything is the same: arms, legs, heart. But everything feels like it's in the wrong place."

Rhys blinked once and turned back to his bitter. "Well."

"What did you think I'd say?" Honestly, she didn't think she'd answered the question quite well. There was a screech from the hen night and she sighed, placing her head in her hands. She was tired, but not tired. She wanted to drink about three or four more pints and force herself to pass out, but she wasn't sure that was a good idea or not.

Rhys's glass thunked as he set it on the wooden surface of the bar. "I don't know. I guess I thought you'd have more to say about it. I dunno. I think I'd still be rather hacked off about the whole thing." He paused. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Oh god, Owen was right; he was the most understanding man on the planet. Suddenly, Gwen's chest felt tight; she might have worried about Jack's heart if she didn't know better. Well, usually knew better.

"Just." Gwen shut her eyes. "Just talk about Ruth, or, or Banana Boat, or haulage. How was your day? Just tell me things. You don't have to look at me," she said. "Just, talk and pretend that I'm me."

A hand landed on hers and she felt Rhys's thumb circle the back of her palm. "I know you're in there, Gwen." The hand disappeared and she had to open her eyes to watch him sliding off the barstool and snagging his coat from the back. "Let's go home, yeah? It's been along day, and I'm knackered."

She shrugged her shoulders and staggered when her jump from the stool was shorter than normal. Rhys smirked a little.

They walked back to the flat together, not arm in arm, not because that was a sight too odd in twenty-first century Cardiff, but because Gwen was sure that they would encounter their neighbours again, and she didn't want to have to explain it later, why Rhys was letting some bloke hang off his arm like his best girl.

 _I let Jack get me off in the shower this morning,_ she almost said out loud. It was on the tip of her tongue. Right there on the front, as if she could open her mouth and it would trip out. She didn't even know why she felt the need to say it. It would just make Rhys upset. Maybe she could ask Rhys about wanking properly. Maybe she should just pretend that she didn't have a fucking slinky in her trousers, pretend that she was asexual and that there was nothing behind the curtain.

She watched Rhys walk up the stairs to their flat and her eyes drifted to his arse. Something in her stirred. "Oh Jesus," she groaned. It was _exasperating_.

"What?" Rhys asked over his shoulder, and she knew that he'd forgotten about her body, because even though they'd been drinking together, talking for at least an hour, he seemed genuinely shocked to see her standing just behind him on the landing.

She smirked. "Nothing."

"I'd give you the tour," Rhys joked as they entered, "but you live here."

She crossed her arms. "Oh no, go ahead."

Rhys tossed his coat on the sofa and waved an arm. "Kitchenette, sofa, telly," he said, smirking. "Bathroom, bedroom. The bed lives in there." He stopped then, looking at her, and she got the distinct impression that he was looking through her for something. She waved a hand and he started, frowning at her.

Then it hit her. "Oh, the bed," she said, casting her eyes about the sitting room. Rhys stood in the center of the room, glancing at the open bedroom door. It hadn't occurred to her that this was going to happen, and it should have. From the look on Rhys's face, it hadn't occurred to him, either. What had they been thinking?

"I'll just…I can sleep on the sofa, or," Gwen shrugged. "Or at the Hub if you want. Jack will probably wreck most of the clothes you packed, so I'll throw a few more into a bag and—"

Rhys grabbed her arm at the bicep and squeezed. "Hey, hey-- woah, you're more fit than I am now," he muttered, then shook his head. "No, it's alright, yeah? The bed is big enough."

Gwen wondered how many pints he'd had; Rhys eyes were a little glassy, and she'd been so distracted she hadn't been keeping track. She watched him head for the bedroom, laying Jack's coat over the back of the sofa.

Rhys must have been a little squiffy, because he swung back around and pointed a finger. "But if this is all still some joke and you're really Jack—"

Gwen raised her hands, the size of them when they were up, fingers splayed, still shocked the hell out of her. She shoved them into her pockets and shrugged instead. "Last week I broke one of your Boba Fett limited edition pint glasses," she said. "I think you might have cried a little."

Rhys stared at her before turning back towards the open door. "Bloody Torchwood," he grumbled under his breath.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ianto took the broom handle from Jack's hands. "That would be one of the worst ideas you have ever had."

"Oh come on, there's no _way_ you can know that for sure."

"No actually, that doesn't matter, because I don't happen to have condoms on me," Ianto said dryly as he stowed the broom in the closet. He stared at the shelves of cleansers, making a note to locate some more Simple Green; these days they seemed to go through it like…like body bags. He made a note to check those, too.

Jack's arms tightened around his waist. It made moving about and cleaning very difficult. "Gwen's on the pill."

Ianto considered this; they would still need the condoms. In addition, "Have you been taken her pill?"

Jack's arms slacked and stilled. "Oops."

Ianto rolled his eyes and unwound the arms from his waist. "Yes. I believe 'oops' is the correct word for that."

He wasn't even sure why he was still here. Everyone else had gone, and he should have gone as well, but that would have meant leaving Jack, and part of Ianto was loathe to leave Gwen's poor, defenseless body in the hands of a man who, until the day before, was incapable of dying, and had been so for at least a hundred years. Jack had over a century to let mortal danger become habit. Ianto wasn't sure when his head had established Jack as some clumsy, devil-may-care stuntman, and he wasn't entirely sure that this was even a correct assessment, but on the other hand, he knew that they couldn't be sure that it _wasn't_ an accurate assessment nonetheless, and well, it was better to be safe than sorry.

No matter how much he might miss Jack if he died, he figured that Gwen would miss Jack and her body more. Sometimes it was hard to tell which.

He tidied the mugs and straightened the glasses on the conference room sideboard, Jack leaning against the wall, his hands shoved into his pockets. Unfortunately, Gwen's denims were skintight, so his hands were curled into little balls and pressed into his thighs, and Jack just looked uncomfortable.

"Did Rhys pack any sleepwear in that bag?" he asked. "Because I imagine that you'll need it. You know, for sleeping." He didn't care to hear about how Jack slept naked at the moment, and he'd unwittingly set himself up for it.

Jack rolled his eyes. "I think he's angry with me. There's a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt with a pony on it. A. Pony."

Ianto smirked and turned out of the room, heading down the stairs. He could hear Jack's trainers following him. "I imagine that you're living some adolescent girl's dream right now."

"To swap bodies with a thirty something woman—" He stopped when Ianto cut a glance at him, raising his brows. "Late _twenties_ something woman who fights aliens and has a fiancé in haulage?" Ianto pursed his lips and repressed a smile when Jack grabbed his chest. "Well, my body's pretty good, and I have a sexy accent. Or I _did;_ but now I just kind of sound like middle America. I should get some roller skates and a job at the Tastee Freez."

Ianto rolled his eyes and resumed checking the levels on the cells again. They wanted to make sure that the poison was completely gone before dumping anything down there again. It wouldn't take long before they would need them. "I'm fairly sure that was the plot of a Jennifer Garner film," he answered distractedly.

"Jennifer Garner worked at the Tastee Freez?"

Ianto left him standing at Tosh's workstation and instead went off in search of beer. They had a plethora of it cached around the Hub, cleverly hidden from Owen. Ianto didn't think beer was a very good idea at all, but he thought that perhaps being without it could make the evening drag on even slower.

A mental image of what Jack had described earlier in full lurid detail, ruby lips inches from his ear stopped him in the process of freeing the church key from the refrigerator. Instead, he grabbed a bottle of water and sat down on the sofa, leaving the unopened bottle on the coffee table in front of him.

Jack flopped down next to him and put his feet up on the table. The rubber squeaked on the surface for a second. "I had a girlfriend once who told me that she felt like a gay man trapped inside a woman's body."

Ianto frowned. "What does that even mean?"

Jack smiled. "That there are stranger things than being stuck in Gwen for a few days." The two of them leant back into the sofa cushions. Jack turned his head towards him and his lips quirked in a small grin. "You know—"

Here it was then.

"Jack, Jack, Jack. No." Ianto shook his head and patted Jack's knee. He desperately tried to focus on the screensaver on Owen's monitors, but it looked like a pulsating vagina. He made a mental note to hack in and delete it tomorrow.

Jack sighed. "Did you know that Gwen can put her legs behind her head? I checked. Wanna see?"

Ianto rolled his eyes and his head turned over to stare at Jack's face. "Gwen didn't give you free rein with her flesh, even though you might have given her yours."

Jack's fingers drummed down Ianto's thigh. "And how. Then again, she's Welsh, so she's probably sitting stiffly in some pub, _talking_ to Rhys instead of—"

"Oi," Ianto interjected, pointing to himself. "Welsh."

"Oh right," Jack replied. He stared off into space for a second, possibly thinking of a response, possibly mesmerised by the steady stream of water down the wall of the tower. He was like that sometimes. Paying attention without paying attention. Most people mistook it as distraction. Ianto often wondered if Jack saw things that he couldn't. But since he was still doing it in Gwen's body, it wasn't some futuristic genetic trait. It was pure Jack, the world's most efficient multi-tasker.

"It's strange," Jack said finally, "that as deliciously deviant and twisted as your brain is, _we're_ still just sitting here. Instead of indulging in a different body—"

Ianto looked away from Jack and instead chose to focus on the tea cozy that Owen had on his desk, decorated with obscene marker doodles and covering the Q'nog Trans______. Owen had taken it upon himself to appropriate the box for medical reasons, though he resolutely refused to touch it. He had also renamed it The seX-Box. Ianto refused to admit that it was clever. Out loud.

"A different body that I will still have to see and interact with when this is all over," he objected, finally deciding to look at Jack, reaching out one hand to brush his thumb across Jack's red painted lips. "And I am very sorry, but as intelligent and compartmentalised as I am, Jack, I'll remember."

Jack sucked Ianto's thumb into his mouth and swung one of his legs over Ianto, straddling his lap. "Remember what, then?"

Ianto closed his eyes and let Jack reach down and cup his cock, running nails that weren't actually his own across the fabric. He could feel Jack's tongue on the pad of his thumb, and it was enough to snap his eyes open, to see the fall of Gwen's hair in front of him. He gave himself one split second to free his hands and cup her arse, to slide his fingers up to her waist, so comparatively tiny, to finally reach around and brush her nipples with his thumbs. Jack wasn't wearing a bra, and he groaned. The noise, though not Jack, was thoroughly him.

"Remember her lips on my cock," Ianto breathed, moving his thumbs over Jack's breasts in broad circles. "Remember her riding me on this sofa." He found Jack's doe eyes, lidded in pleasure. "So you and I have to stop this now."

Jack's arms tightened around his neck, and Ianto knew that if Jack pressed him he'd just say, _Fuck it, sorry Gwennie,_ and he could pull that soft shirt off like so much peel and take Jack's breasts into his mouth and undo those sinfully tight jeans, wedge his hand in—

Jack lowered his head to Ianto's shoulder with a breath-filled shudder. Ianto made his hands fall to his sides on the cushions, and he pressed his head into the back cushion of the sofa.

"Oh man," Jack whispered, "we're not going to do this, are we?"

Ianto let Jack roll off him before replying, managing to crack a small smile. "No."

Jack sighed.

"On the other hand, Gwen is a lightweight," Ianto offered.

It was Jack's turn to smile. Even with Gwen's gap-toothed grin, the movement was intrinsically Jack. "How will that not lead to sex?"

Ianto groaned. He was right. He was _always_ right. "Curses. Foiled again."

They sat in silence for a few seconds before he turned his head and regarded Jack's rather deflated and stymied form. "Tosh hid a pint of Häagen-Dazs in one of the empty cryo vaults."

Jack pumped his fist once. "Score."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Gwen woke up hard again. She hadn't quite been sleeping; it was more like drifting in and out while watching a film—very short sections of the plot were missing because you were asleep, but time seemed to be drawn out, and what was truly an hour seemed like five. And underneath it all was the hum of the sound, as if she could hear everything even while she was asleep, from Rhys's snores to the neighbours arguing next door to the hum of the pipes and the clock on her nightstand, noises that she usually lost in true sleep.

But there was a considerable level of 'drift,' and Gwen came back to herself from a dream about dancing ice lollies and opened her eyes, only to be met with darkness. It was the middle of the night.

"Fucking hell, Jack," she growled, rolling onto her stomach and hitching her breath when the sweatpants she was wearing rubbed at her cock, and then the weight of her body pressed it against her stomach, into the bed. "How the hell is everything about sex?"

Rhys rolled in her direction in his sleep, flinging one leg across hers and an arm around her waist. His nose snuffled where her hair was usually splayed out, but only butted Gwen's shoulder. She froze, and Rhys thrashed, shooting bolt upright in bed.

"What the hell—"

"Rhys, it's me," she groaned into the pillow. "Gwen, remember?"

This wasn't working. She couldn't sleep here, and she couldn't _sleep,_ for that matter. She wasn't exactly tired. Her brain was tired. Gwen was used to stopping at a six-hour stretch, occasionally a generous eight-hour stretch, and not thinking about anything. Jack apparently, didn't need much sleep, if any, and was used to the fact that his brain was running twenty-four seven. She made a mental note to ask him what it had been like the first few years he had been immortal.

But for now, Gwen pushed up on her arms and sat upright, facing Rhys. "I'm going back to the Hub."

Rhys flopped back onto the bed and flipped an arm over his eyes. "Jesus Gwen, did I ask you to? I just—" He raked his hand over his face and stared at her in the moonlight. "I just thought…."

Gwen tried to draw her knees up and wrap her arms about them, but that wasn't a comfortable position anymore. She settled for curling one leg under her and dangling one over the edge of the bed. "Thought what then?"

Rhys closed his eyes again. "I thought that if I could deal with this, then I could deal with anything your job brought home, you know? What could be worse than this?"

Gwen could rattle off at least a dozen things without even pausing to think, but she pursed her lips and watched Rhys roll onto his side, away from her.

"You know it's me, right?" she whispered. "It still is all me."

Rhys snorted and his shoulder jumped with the action of it. "You're in Jack bloody Harkness's body, Gwen. It's _not_ all you."

Gwen gave that thought. There were several ways to respond to that statement, and she wasn't sure what one to use, because, she realised, that it was true. For all the mouth service they paid to a person being more than just the physical, it was true that Gwen was the body that she wasn't currently in. Gwen was also right there on the bed. Gwen was a woman, with a bloke and a pair of tits and a history, a physical history. Gwen was also a man sitting on the bed, softening erection in his pants, wondering just if s/he still had a bloke, or if this was something that she'd have to put on hold until Gwen the woman was back together.

"Can I," she started, not sure how to say it. "Can I hold you, Rhys?" She slid her face into her hands, a stray thought marvelling that she hadn't any facial hair yet (Would she ever? She wasn't looking forward to shaving her face.). "I just. I don't feel well, you know, this is all so _fucked_ —"

Rhys looked at her over his shoulder, then rolled about to face her, something in his face soft and resigned. "Oh, come on then, you daft girl." He held his arms out, and she crawled towards him. There were a few seconds of getting acquainted, shifting, Gwen had to slide down on the bed so that she was low enough to bury her face in the crook of Rhys's arm. She curled one of her arms up against her chest, and the top one slung low on Rhys's waist. Rhys threw a leg over her, like he normally did, and they chuckled when it stuck out in the air as he tried to keep it over Jack's larger thighs.

"I'm guessing Jack isn't taking this as bad as you?"

Gwen smiled into Rhys's shoulder. "What makes you say that?"

"Oh be serious. He's been trying to get into your pants for ages," Rhys said, his voice dark. "I can tell these things."

Gwen sighed. She wasn't sure if he was right or not. It probably wouldn't help to tell him that Jack tried to get into a lot of people's pants, possibly his. She didn't want to get into the discussion about Jack's liberal ideas of sexual experience. And to be truthful, that wasn't what Rhys had meant when he said that Jack was taking this well. That had been a throwaway line, the pants thing.

He meant what she said then: "You think he's out there, fondling himself, right now, don't you?"

Rhys was silent for a long moment, and she wondered if she had gone too far. She didn't want to think about Jack touching her body, touching her, because that was making her hard again, and so she tried that trick she had always heard about: _cleaning toilets with her tongue, shagging a Weevil, picking maggots out of her pony's foot when she was nine._ Yeah, that was working.

Rhys finally snorted again. "Well, he better not get used to it, because he gets this tired old thing back in a week." He smacked her back and ended the hit with a circular rub and a press of his hand to her shoulder blades.

That was heartening. She laid there and listened to the sound of Rhys's heavy breathing, her neighbours, who had finally moved past their argument and gone straight to the make up sex, the hum of her clock on her bedside table again, the groaning of the pipes as someone flushed a toilet overhead.

"Would you?" she asked, not sure that she wanted to even broach the topic, but not able to stop herself. "If I was like this forever, would you?"

Rhys stilled in her arms, and then reached out one hand to run through her hair, though seemingly at a loss when it found it too short. "Let's not go there," he said. "Too soon for that kind of talk."

Gwen closed her eyes and agreed. She didn't want to have to think about the possibility of this being permanent. What if the machine was broken? What if nineteen Geelucks was actually fifty years? That would be terrifying, watching her body grow older (or with Jack's luck, die horribly in a year or so), or to stay this way for years only to suddenly and without warning be thrust back into an eighty-year-old body and die of shock or some other health issue days later.

She tried to calm her heart, but she didn't know any tricks for that. So she breathed into Rhys's shirt and concentrated on how his cologne always seemed to settle on his chest, in the hair there, and that even now, in the middle of the night, she could smell it in the mix of his sweat and the fabric softener they used.

"You'd have to stop working out, though," Rhys said finally. "Can't have you being prettier than me."

Gwen laughed, and she tried not to mind when the voice didn't sound like hers.

 

 **WEDNESDAY**

 _I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I'd like to have one of those little beds with my name on it._ (Jack Handey)

Rhys made her toast and tea, and that was a blessing, because she had spent too much time in the shower, trying to wank appropriately. Her wishful thinking about wanking in the beginning of the day to prevent other…incidents had held (or was coincidence, but she wasn't going to risk it, and she wasn't about to ask any of the four men who could answer her properly), so she wanted to get it over with and wash so that she could straggle in to work and do her bloody job with what she had decided to call 'Jack's gigantic man-hands'.

She tried not to focus on the actual anatomy when she touched herself, instead closing her eyes and running her fingers over Jack's cock. It wasn't, _would never be_ her cock. There were things, though, oh god, _things_ that she could do to it by accident, like running her fingers along the underside, or pulling the foreskin back until she could circle her thumb over whole head. Gwen came pressing her head into the tiles of the shower, trying not to make any noise for either Rhys or her neighbours.

She stuffed Jack's wrinkled clothes into a shopping bag and stared at herself in the mirror. She wasn't going to do anything with herself until she got to the Hub and Jack could tell her what she was doing wrong (Probably everything. She couldn't get the hair to stand, _that way_. And Jack wore too many layers.) Instead, she dug about in the back of Rhys's closet until she found serviceable if slightly baggy denims, a T-shirt from a beer festival in 2004 that she vaguely remembered going to, and a pair of socks that she didn't think he would miss. Obviously, Jack's --frightfully practical-- shoes would do well. Gwen shoved Jack's keys into her pants and ignored the fact that she wasn't wearing underwear. She also considered with some amusement that she still had Jack's keys as well as her own. And Jack's wristwatch.

Rhys glanced at her when she thundered down the small set of stairs into the kitchenette, and she startled herself a little with the sound of it. Jack's shoes made it almost impossible to tiptoe across the floor, but if she could have she would have considered it.

Rhys slid the plate of toast to her and nodded at the cup over on the stove. "That's a new look," he said.

Gwen smirked. Yeah, it was comforting to be wearing something less Captain-ish, but it was also oddly reassuring to be wearing Rhys. It didn't hurt that she'd get to irritate Jack with her wrinkled appearance. "I nicked your old clothes," she said. "I'll tell Jack you donated them to the cause."

Rhys rolled his eyes. "The things I give to that man. My clothes, my beer shirts. My fiancée's body." He bit into a piece of toast and shoved his arms in his jacket. "I have to go. I'm late."

Gwen twirled the triangle of toast in her fingers. "I'm staying at the Hub tonight," she told him, glancing out the window at the neighbours, who looked to be late as well, if the general speed of their scurrying down the walk was anything to go by. She smiled and thought that they wouldn't be so late if they could manage to cut back on their three a.m. sexual sprees. Oh, last night's lack of sleep mad made her catty.

Rhys dipped his hand in the key bowl and retrieved his, along with his wallet. "Oh, right. Well, for the best, eh?" He stood there, waiting, as if he was waiting for her. Gwen pulled Jack's belt out of the bag, untangling it from the braces. On second thought, she was going to need it with these denims.

"Well, I'll call you, then, yeah?" she said. "I'll be around, check in, and you call whenever."

Rhys smiled at her, but it was weak. "I suppose it's better that way. Don't do anything I wouldn't do, yeah?" he joked, but his face twisted when he looked at her face.

Gwen stopped threading the belt. That was an interesting thought. She'd only given skimming thoughts to anything involving Rhys and sex with this body. Most of those thoughts didn't involve her on a physically present level, and that was something that she didn't want to analyse. Her fingers twitched around the belt.

"Why Rhys," she said, batting her eyelashes and yanking the belt on. "Do you want me to do something?"

Rhys stared at her as he leant in the doorway, one hand frozen on the knob of the door. Something evaluative went through his eyes, and then he shook his head and shoulders, like jerking from a reverie. "I'll call you."

Gwen watched him shut the front door behind him almost too gently. She finished pulling Jack's belt through the loops of Rhys's denims and stared at the closed door.

"Huh."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"So, lemme see if I have this straight," Jack said, repeatedly tossing a ball up into the air with one hand and catching it with the other. "The night that we figure the Xarxians came through the Rift, they managed to land somewhere in the vicinity of this animal shelter."

Tosh nodded. "Correct."

"And then they left the shelter, scattered across the city and probably never saw each other again."

"In all likelihood, yes."

"And now, some of the dogs at the shelter are displaying some…unusual habits."

Ianto looked over Tosh's shoulder and read the report on her monitor, squinting at the glare. "It says here that Muffles the Rottweiler, aged two and very friendly, has become sedate and yesterday tried to eat fifteen pieces of flatware from the staff cutlery drawer."

Jack paused his catch-and-release game and smiled. "Oh, reeeeeeally."

Tosh smirked and nodded. "Ya rilly."

Ianto bumped her shoulder. "No internet memes before eight."

"But wait, there's more," she said, trying out an impression of an infomercial on them. "I made some calls." She clicked a few keys. "The only two people on duty that night were volunteer Dylan Smith and veterinarian Simran Parikh. Dylan lives in Grangetown, and he's been ill. Called off two days and hasn't phoned in for today." She smiled. "I thought you could visit him."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "I'll get my nurse's cap."

Ianto placed a hand on his arm. "Really, that's just a novelty item. They don't wear them anymore." Tosh ducked her head. Sometimes Ianto couldn't help himself. So many jokes, so little time.

"How disappointing." Jack threw the ball at him and he caught it one-handed. A quick toss at Jack revealed that Jack wasn't as deft. That was new. He raised an eyebrow and Jack looked elsewhere. "So," Jack said quickly, "I think I'll take Gwen out for a spin in her new wheels. What do you think?"

"I think you should let her drive the SUV," Tosh said, not looking up from her monitors.

Ianto nodded. "She's right. You'll just misalign the seat placement. And the mirrors." He smiled when Jack frowned at him. Letting Gwen drive the SUV was possibly the pithiest consolation prize for her current condition that Ianto could think of (except possibly a book of coupons for free take-away, no wait, that was rather nice, actually), and with the added bonus of irritating Jack, which he sometimes chose to make a hobby. Not a hobby. A useful skill. Sometimes foreplay, but not today. Today he just wanted Gwen to drive the SUV.

No, he wanted to irritate Jack.

"That's sexism," Jack muttered. Ianto rolled his eyes but congratulated himself and Tosh on a job well done. He wondered when Jack would realise that Gwen still had his keys to the SUV.

"I don't understand," Tosh said. "More than one dog is exhibiting signs of…disturbance. If they switched bodies with the Xarxians, then how was that, then? The machine was _inside_ one of them at the time." She frowned. "The energy spike was huge, but it was only one spike."

Jack shrugged. "Maybe the box doesn't completely work on a touch basis. Proximity?"

Tosh stared at the screen for a minute, but it was obvious that she was looking through it, not really seeing anything. "I'll look at the box again. It's possible. It could be set to transfer any given number of bodies within a certain radius."

Something about that bothered Ianto. Oh, yes. "Hold on, then, if it doesn't rely on touch right now, but rather vicinity, then why didn't it switch me with one of you two? I was in that room. It should have swapped us all." Just the thought of being in any body other than his own made Ianto's skin crawl.

Tosh retrieved the scanner from her desk and ran it along Ianto's body. "You _do_ read positive for residual traces. I think you looped."

Jack tossed his ball up into the air and Myfanwy caught it on one of her fly-bys. "Aw." He glanced back at them. "Hey, are you saying that Ianto switched with himself?"

Tosh grinned. "That's exactly what I'm saying." Ianto breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn't been worried because well, he checked himself again: suit. Tie. Excellent.

"Well," he said into the silence, because despite being relieved, he was curious and a little bit unnerved, and a little _put out_ that the machine had decided that he wasn't worthy or whatever. "That's. Uhm…"

"Nifty," Jack finished for him. "Maybe it had a reason." Jack waved his hands at the pteranodon, probably hoping that he could get his ball back. Ianto almost wished him good luck. Myfanwy had about fifty tennis balls in the back of her nest, and she wasn't letting go of any of them. "Maybe you're so spiff that it didn't think you needed to learn anything."

Ianto didn't know what to say about that either. Spiff?

"Where is Owen"? Jack asked suddenly. Apparently being in a different body hadn't altered his ability to tangent wildly.

Ianto glanced at Owen's screensaver, which was now a scrolling marquee that read 'We at Torchwood do not display pornography on our screensavers.' Just looking at it was satisfying. And it was passkey locked, as well.

He was about to answer that Owen had called in to say that he was running late when something beeped on Tosh's computer and she glanced at the monitor before pulling up to the keyboard and commandeering it with her speed-of-light fingers. "Something is going on at Dylan Smith's flat," she said.

Ianto glanced over her shoulder. "Rift energy?"

She looked back at them and frowned. "No, the police are there."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Remember," Jack said, his voice soft, "be more flip. Less copper."

Gwen stared at him. "Less. Copper."

"Yeah. You know, more Torchwoody."

What did Jack do in these situations? Gwen shrugged and tried to plaster on a smile. That was more like it. Jack almost always smiled when he met DI Swanson, until she showed him whatever it was that she was there for. "Oh," Gwen said, "like a funny Batman."

Jack grinned. "Exactly." He lifted up the tape and they ducked under. "I dated Bob Kane once. He liked my coat." Gwen shot him a dirty look, though it was less about Jack's ridiculous story and more that she was once again wearing his clothes, and she didn't like the way the braces fit. "No really."

Gwen didn't get a chance to say anything because a very cranky Detective Inspector stopped them. "I don't even know why you're here, Harkness," she told Gwen, crossing her arms and frowning. "It's an assault, not a murder. Not even rather odd, at that."

"Hey hey hey," Gwen said in what she thought was a rather good American accent. It didn't seem to strike Swanson as odd. "That's so accusatory, DI Swanson. Maybe I just wanted to see your face." Even as she said it, it sounded…hrm.

The detective rolled her eyes. "What does Torchwood want with a few animal shelter workers?"

Gwen was about to speak, but Jack crossed his arms and looked like he was going to do his best 'pissing contest' glare. "We'll know that when we get in there," he said, and Gwen almost winced at the accent. It was _horrific._ Painful. Like Ianto drunk and talking through fan blades.

"What can you tell us, Detective Inspector?" she asked, holding a hand up and putting the other on Jack's shoulder. The look DI Swanson gave her was…odd. Gwen removed her hand. Jack just shrugged and waved to Andy. Of course Andy was here. Then Jack gave her an unreadable glance and milled away. Gwen wanted to follow him to say something about not talking to anybody, but suddenly she was aware of Swanson's eyes on her. She gave the woman what she hoped was a reassuring and not at all condescending smile and then plastered her face into one of grave concern.

"One Dylan Smith, age twenty-five, volunteers at the local RSPCA. He lives here." She waved at the building behind her. "He was reported missing this morning by a co-worker at National Westminster. Units searched the apartment and found him in the toilet, in the process of pulling a one Simran Parikh out of the bathtub. Miss Parikh, also twenty-five and also missing from her full-time job at the same RSPCA branch for the past two days, has been transported to hospital. She's rather battered, and there's evidence of some sort of fight."

Swanson gave her the look. Gwen knew the look; she'd given it herself more than a few times. It was the look that she gave every man for about an hour after she had worked a domestic case.

"So he was trying to drown her?" Gwen asked, shoving her hands into her pockets and glancing off into the distance, focusing on the building, anywhere but at Swanson's face.

"Yeah perhaps. He _says_ that he was just trying to get her out, that she had taken some pills and beaten herself up." Swanson snorted. "He _says_ that she did all this to herself, but he wasn't quite clear as to why she would choose to do it at his flat."

Gwen shook her head. Something was wrong. Pieces weren't connecting in the case, and she hadn't a clue as to what they were. Was there another piece of alien tech that the Xarxians brought with them that they hadn't come across yet? Something that could account for this event and the Xarxians feral qualities? Maybe this was all a coincidence. Gwen seriously doubted it.

"We just want to take a look around," she said finally, rocking on her feet like she'd seen Jack do many times, when he was trying to be nonchalant. She glanced at Jack, who was in a discussion with someone she had never seen before. Oh thank goodness. DI Swanson gave her the look again, and she smiled sheepishly. "We'll be in and out before you know it," she finished and started towards the building, trying to make her coat billow intimidatingly.

She wasn't far enough away to miss hearing Swanson mutter, "Bloody Torchwood."

Jack fell into step next to her, the plastic kit he'd snagged from the back of the SUV swinging jauntily in his hand. They skipped the lift and took the stairs to the second floor. She kept ramming her toes into the backboard of the steps. Her feet took up a whole step. _More_ than a whole step.

"What was with the confrontational act back there?" Gwen mumbled under her breath. "I thought you said not to be copper."

Jack smiled. "Gwen Cooper used to be a cop. Besides, she was ignoring me."

She shrugged. "I was never that bossy. And you always take charge in this kind of thing, of course she'll ignore you now."

Jack coughed. "Whose idea is that? Oh yeah, mine." He smiled and flipped his hair out of his collar with one hand. "Your accent is fab."

Gwen pulled on a pair of latex gloves she snagged from the box on the kitchen counter. "Yours is rubbish. Just let me do the rest of the talking," she snapped a little and then blushed when one of the female officers glared at her. Out of context, she sounded like a bit of an arse.

Jack grinned. "I think I'm starting to feel minimised."

Gwen turned her own glare on him. "You don't get to complain about sexism until you've been in that body for a lot longer," she said, opening the kit on the counter and pulling out the scanner Tosh had showed her how to use.

Jack waved her offer of gloves away and instead shoved his hands in his pockets. Jack did that a lot. He didn't touch much at crime scenes, and if he did, he never wore gloves. He was a scene control unit's nightmare. "One of the other officers down there called me 'lamb,' does that count?"

Gwen smirked. "Oh yes, names are the worst of it, sweetcheeks," she told him, picking at the discarded mail on the counter. "It's all uphill from there."

Jack gave her a wonky smile and turned into the bedroom "Woah, they weren't kidding when they said that there was a fight."

He was right. Furniture was upended, the bedding was on the floor, on the bed, and parts of it were torn. The beige carpet was wet and pink with bloody water, presumably from where Dylan had laid Simran's body when he'd pulled it from the bath. Three empty bottles of cheap scotch rolled about on the floor at her feet; the movement and noise when she inadvertently kicked them surprised her and she jumped.

Gwen cocked her head and ran the scanner down the walls. "Why would the blood be registering residual energy from the box?" she asked softly, lowering the scanner, which was getting a few funny looks from the officer at the door. Well, it was large and glowy and blue. She wondered if she could pass it off as a portable luminol scanner. Probably not. One of the best things about being Torchwood anyway was that she didn't actually have to explain anything; the coppers hated them already, so there were no worries about anyone getting stroppy.

Jack tried to read the scanner over her shoulder, but he was too short. She handed the scanner to him, and then he consulted the wrist strap on this arm, punching a few buttons. "Maybe if the blood came from a body that had been exposed to the machine?" he replied finally, but it was half a question.

Gwen resisted the urge to lean against the wall. All the pieces fell into place. She got the strange sensation that she usually felt when she was winning at Tetris and everything fit. "You mean, these two people—"

"Got caught up in the body switch at the shelter, I'm guessing." He shrugged. "Makes sense."

"They could be in a dog," Gwen said. "Tosh said the energy spike happened once, and in a huge way. Everyone switched at once, and, Jesus, Jack," she murmured. "They could have been in one of those Xarxians we had to put down."

 _Had to put down_ , as if they were talking about a wild animal. It made her rethink a few things for a second. How many times did she shoot without thinking these days? Did any of them? Dear God.

"I should have gone to the shelter with Ianto," she mumbled.

Jack's hand was on her arm before she even noticed that he had crossed the room again. "Hey, they probably swapped with each other," Jack told her. His eyes were wide, but they were still glancing everywhere, at her, at the walls, at the tousled covers on the bed. "If either of them wasn't human, this would have played out differently, and we'd be here picking up pieces with Owen. And probably a lot sooner than today. Probably a lot closer to the shelter, too."

Right then. "We should assume that they switched with each other. Dylan, came back here, and, what? Broke down?"

Jack screwed up his face in a manner that suggested something, distaste? Disappointment? It was hard to read her face when she didn't know what the face was feeling. When this was over, Gwen knew she'd be making faces into the mirror for a while.

"They're probably terrified, Jack," Gwen said. "We should pick up Dylan and bring him back to Torchwood."

Jack's eyebrows rose. "Oh really now? If he is switched, then how do you suppose that we handle all this when everything returns to normal?" He shook his head. "This is already a retcon nightmare. I'm not saying that we shouldn't help, but maybe he'd just be better off in a cell for now—"

Gwen shook her head. "If they switched, then Simran is in that body. She doesn't understand anything that happened, and she's frantic, and she just pulled her own body out of a bathtub, half-drowned and overdosed." Gwen had to stop and consciously make an effort to lower her voice because the officer in charge was giving her a funny look. "I don't know how this experience has been for you, but I haven't been enjoying it nearly as well as you seem to be doing."

Jack dumped the scanner into the kit and slammed the lid shut. "Fine. You have until we get to the station to figure out what we're going to do with him. Her. Him, whatever." He looked at her, and Gwen felt a little like shrinking. "Now let's make our grand Torchwood exit."

"It's not that easy for me, either, you know," Jack muttered as they walked back to the SUV. "I'm trying to be your leader, and that's hard to do in muleheels."

Gwen rolled her eyes. "I did it for weeks while you were away. Deal with it." Then she tossed him the keys. "You drive."

Jack caught the keys with both hands –usually he used one, a small but noticeable tell—and smiled. "And who says you're not in touch with your masculine side?"

Gwen sighed and stowed the kit in the back of the SUV while Jack called back to the Hub to relay what they had learned. She was firmly in the passenger's seat and clicking in her belt when Jack ended the communication with Tosh and slammed the door to the SUV shut. "Tosh and Owen are on their way to the hospital. They're going to see if they can't wake Miss Parikh up a little and confirm our guess." He grimaced. "And you're right, we're going to have to pick up Dylan at the station and take him into custody."

Gwen sighed and adjusted the seat height. She kept hitting her head when she sat up straight. Who was in here last? Oh wait, that would have been her. Her-her, not her-him…her.

"Think you can handle that?" Jack asked lightly. He adjusted the mirrors that usually were set to his height and pulled the seat forward a little.

Gwen nodded. "Right." She tried her best accent. "Torchwood business," she drawled, "we're going to need to take Dylan Smith into custody. No, I'm not going to give you that information. If you have a problem with that, feel free to take it up with Whitehall." She grinned at herself in the passenger mirror and then at one of the police officers, who were watching her from the next patrol car over. "This gets easier every time I try it," she mused.

Jack turned the ignition over, grinning. "I might just stay in the car. Maybe pop down to the café at the end of the street for a coffee."

Gwen almost told him to do it, too. In fact, she was still mulling it over when they turned down the end of the lane and towards the larger road. Jack went out by himself all the time. Truthfully, she did too, but something about swaggering in there and taking charge of a possible murderer under the guise of Cap'n Jack Harkness appealed to her. She supposed she ought to try it once.

Secretly, what she wanted to say was Captain Gwen Cooper.

"Seriously though," she said, as Jack pulled out into traffic, "how is it that your Welsh accent is so poor? You've been here for years. Surely you can do better than that."

Jack looked in the rearview mirror and then glanced at her. "Never had to. People like you are always around to do it for me."

Gwen rolled her eyes.

"Besides," he said, bouncing in his seat as they rolled over a few sleeping policemen. "Chicks dig the accent."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen loved hospitals. Well, he would have to. Unfortunately, as he was fond of saying, they were filled with sick people. He didn't even mind the sick people, actually, since they were what he was supposed to be concentrating on. It was the fact that they talked and walked and whinged and snivelled and asked him cheap questions like, 'so Doctor, when this is over, will I be able to play the piano?' Har-de-fucking-har.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and let Tosh carry the scanning equipment, since she had smacked his hands when he reached for the kit anyway. Served her right if it was heavy.

They didn't have to do much to find Simran Parikh's room; Tosh had already taken the pertinent information from the A&E records and they'd got the bay number. They had flashed a few fake IDs to get them in, and now they pulled the curtain in the room and settled down to wait on the nurse, who was fussing over the auto pump. Owen helped himself to the chart at the end of the bed, flicking past the initials and down the litany of treatment measures.

Her charts were the mess that charts were in the few first hours of a patient's arrival. They'd intubated and inserted a foley catheter, too, standard procedure. And then they'd drawn blood for the toxin screen, dropped the nasal/gastric tube and tied her in soft restraints. The consultant had ordered a push of Romazicon to counteract possible drugs in her system instead of waiting to see what Simran had taken (or been given). They had started the stomach lavage and charcoal shortly before he and Tosh had left for hospital.

Down at the bottom of the first few forms, someone who must have been working with her as they inserted the tube had left a black finger smudge. They'd managed to flush her out with saline and brought up most of the pills whole. All the wounds she had were superficial, but she had needed a few steri-strips.

He sat on the stool and watched Simran as the nurse changed out her IV. Tosh perched on the visitor's chair in the corner.

"Poor thing isn't doing so well, actually." The nurse checked the restraints with one hand and they watched the auto cuff take her blood pressure. "Keeps trying to pull the IV out. We just extubated her twenty minutes ago."

Owen shrugged. She might have still had drugs in her system from the overdose, though that was probably minimal. "Is the tox screen back?"

The nurse glanced at him as he flipped through the pages. "And who are you, again?"

Owen flashed what he hoped looked like a police badge. Okay, it _was_ a police badge, but it was a cribbed one he'd had Tosh make for him, and she'd listed his name as 'Scribbelty Bibbeltydink,' and they hadn't had time to change it to something less…well idiotic, before today. It would have been just his luck to be caught impersonating a police officer with the most absurd name in the history of ever on his fake badge.

"Police," he said. "Just want to make sure that we have all the papers in order when we file charges against Mr. Smith." He glanced at Simran again, doing his best to seem as clueless as he certainly wasn't. In fact, he really shouldn't have had the chart. Cops never looked at the chart.

The nurse made a noise in her throat that was probably a statement about what she thought of Dylan Smith. "Well, she's in and out, but if you give her a few minutes, she might be able to tell you something." She didn't even bother to disguise the threat in her face. "But if you press her, I'll have your name in to your superior, do you hear?" She curled around the curtain and was gone.

"So," Tosh said when they were sure that she was gone, "your expert medical opinion? Can she talk?"

Owen shrugged. "I don't know. Let's see." He reached out and ran his hand down Simran's upper arm, staying well clear of the restraint, the IV and the catheter bag hanging by the bedside. "Miss Parikh? Simran?" he asked, when the woman's eyelids fluttered.

"Get the fuck away from me," she muttered. One of her hands tried to lift up and swing towards him, but it was only able to raise an inch off the bed before the restraint held it there as she strained. Owen watched her hand twist in the cuff.

"Simran?" Tosh asked softly, leaving her chair and approaching the bedside. Owen understood that perhaps the last thing Simran wanted to see was another man, and so he rolled his stool back a little and let Tosh do her empathetic thing. Spice Girl power, and all that.

Simran turned her head, stared at Tosh, and the gaze in her eyes was one of pure fury. "I'm. Not. Simran."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The police station visit had been a great deal less trouble than she had thought it would be. In fact, she was a little disappointed; she didn't know what she had expected, but she had at least thought that she would get to use her, 'This is classified. Take it up with Whitehall' line. As it was, Jack was securing Dylan in the backseat of the SUV while the cops just looked on. They'd turned him right over as soon as she'd said 'Torchwood.'

Anticlimatic.

Gwen wondered when she'd decided that it would be fun to pretend to be Jack while on the job. He certainly wasn't very fun when he was off the clock. Oh, alright, it wasn't that _Jack_ wasn't fun. He was, but he was even more fun when she was in her own body and he was in his. She had thought that being Captain Jack Harkness in an official capacity would be a titillating reward for this whole mess.

Maybe she'd get to hang off the bottom of a helicopter. That would be fulfilling.

She took the keys from Jack and sat in the driver's seat while he secured Dylan's hands in the restraints that they used to cart conscious individuals about. It wasn't very often.

She turned around in her seat and looked at him when Jack shut the passenger door and twisted so that he could behind him. Dylan was a wreck; bloody, still damp, face red and puffy from crying, and also, shaking. Gwen wondered if he'd been fed. Or if he could eat. They'd have to fix all of that. But first:

"So hey," Jack said, waving a hand. "Just humor me, and tell me what your name is."

Dylan glanced up from staring, round eyed, at the powered-down computer screens in the back of the SUV. "It's, well, I'm—"

"Simran Parikh?" Gwen asked, hoping that their guess was correct, mostly because then she'd not sound like a nutter.

Dylan's head turned from staring out the window, or possibly at the window refection of her own foreign face. Gwen knew that look. She laid one hand on Dylan's, which sat limply in her lap. "I'm Gwen. But that's me," she explained, pointing to her body. "Most of the time."

Jack smiled. "And I'm Jack," he said. "But that is me, most of the time." He glanced at Gwen. "Really, how often will we ever get to have this conversation?"

Gwen was thinking it would only be this once, with any luck.

Dylan's eyes flew back and forth between them, and Gwen tried to make her eyes say what her mouth had already relayed. Then the face crumpled, tears spilling over the already red cheeks. "Oh. Oh. You _know_." Simran clutched her hands to her chest and rocked. "You _know_."

Jack glanced at Gwen, and the look on his face was one of 'well, what now?' Gwen didn't know. He was supposed to be the one in charge, right? They could take Simran back to the Hub and…and what? Lock her in a cell? Maybe she could take Simran home with her and—

Oh no. Rhys was having a hard enough time as it was with her. If she threw in another woman in a man's body, he would probably break it off and move in with Banana. Then again, she'd seen Banana's flat.

Simran sighed, sort of a little hiccough, and then she began to talk. "It was Saturday night, and I was stitching up one of the new rescue arrivals." She smiled faintly, and her eyes misted in that way people's did when they were remembering, not really seeing the present. "Dylan was cleaning a few of the spare runs, and then there was a huge bang."

Gwen glanced at Jack, and he mouthed the word, 'Rift.'

"The dogs were going mad. I ran out back, because I thought that maybe something had exploded. Something, I dunno, maybe a transformer had blown or a runaway truck had hit the kennels." She smiled. "Funny, the things you think when you're running towards danger. It all goes so fast, but your brain moves so slowly."

"And when you got there?" Jack asked, resting his temple against the back of the seat. His voice was soft and his eyes were closed, as if he were remembering things of his own. Who knew what he thought about most of the time? Knowing now that Jack was from the future, and that he wasn't even from this planet (though human, he had assured her, one hundred percent human. Well, maybe ninety-eight.), she wondered how he might be different. Three thousand years was a great deal of time for changes in evolution. And science.

"There were all these…things. Creatures. They were tall, and they glowed." She blinked at them. "I remember thinking that they were funny, in a way, because some of them had clothes on, but bad clothes, yeah? Like too small coats and one sock."

Jack's eyes opened. "That explains that, then," he said to himself, but didn't elaborate. He turned his head a bit more to look at their guest. "And then there was a flash and a bang and then you blacked out a bit, right? Woke up with a raging headache right in the middle of your forehead?"

Gwen found herself nodding in answer to Jack's question even though it hadn't been directed at her. That was how it had been. She realised that she hadn't really said it out loud, shared what it had felt like, this sensation of stretching and moving but not moving, and then a slamming feeling, as if she had been hit in the face with something hard and flat.

Simran choked on a sob. "I don't really remember. I felt so ill. And Dylan was screaming. I was looking at me, but I wasn't me, and I was _screaming_."

Gwen rubbed her hand. She didn't need to prompt her, because Simran _wanted_ to tell them. She wanted to get it all out so that she could make it more real. Have it make more sense. Gwen didn't know what to say to that, because she knew what had happened, and it wouldn't help to tell Simran that it had all been an accident. It certainly wasn't helping _her_.

"I didn't know what to do, so I hit him," she said. "but it was too hard." She blinked at Gwen and Jack in turn, her eyes wide and pleading. "I'm so sorry."

Gwen could identify with the feeling. She'd been guilty of that too much in the past two days, this feeling of knocking about in a body that had too much weight to it, too much muscle. She was willing to bet that Simran Parikh was a rather tiny woman normally.

"It's okay," Jack said. "It really is."

Simran took a deep breath and shuddered. "I just. By the time we'd woken up after the…thing, the light, all the creatures were gone. The dogs were mad. Some of them were vomiting. Dylan was just lying there, staring at me.

"I thought if I could get us back to some place, some place where no one would see. How could I explain? What could I say?" She pulled her hand from under Gwen's and grabbed onto Gwen's wrist, almost yanking. "What would I say?"

"I took him back to his flat, thought the rooms would make him feel better, yeah?" When Gwen nodded, she let go of her wrist, but her eyes had gone misty again. "He was so quiet. I tried to talk to him. I tried to get him to call about, call work and tell them that I was sick, but he couldn't talk. I rang his work and booked him off. The first day all we did was stand about in his sitting room and stare at each other."

Gwen remembered her staring contest with Jack in the conference room, when they had managed to convince each other that they could will themselves to switch back if they just _tried_ hard enough, and even now Jack stared at her, narrowed his eyes and quirked his mouth. It wasn't funny. Well, it was, but she had the advantage of knowing what the fuck was going on. She shook her head at him.

"What happened in the bedroom?" she asked, trying to sound as empathetic as she could. Lately she had sounded a little too brash when she spoke.

"We fought a little. Dylan was drinking, and I let him, because I thought, well, I needed a drink too. But he'd been sitting about, and not doing anything. I was trying to figure out whom to call. If there was someone to call. My doctor, maybe. Never called him." She shrugged. "I went out for milk and chips, and when I got back, he was in the bathtub. There were bottles everywhere." She blinked. "I guess I shouldn't have called 999."

Gwen patted her hand again. "The thing that did this to you," she began, but Jack cut her off.

"It will switch you back," he said, his eyes hard. What had he thought she had been going to say? "But it's going to take a few days. Can you hang on for a few more days?" His eyes met hers, and Gwen knew that he was asking her the same thing.

Gwen nodded along with Simran. "Yeah. Oh Jesus, please tell me we will." She bowed her head and then looked up suddenly. "My body, he didn't—"

"We're working on that," Jack said, turning forward in his seat and miming turning the ignition to Gwen. "In the meantime, let's get some place for you to stay, okay?"

There was no assent from the back seat, but in the rearview mirror Gwen watched Simran tilt her head back against the seat. She started the SUV and pulled out into traffic, almost clipping a panda car that she hadn't seen come up behind her. She made an apologetic face and waved one hand, mouthing, "Sorry!"

Jack snorted, but he was playing with something on his wrist strap. "You keep this up, and the police are going to be onto us, Gwen," he said. "And don't think I didn't see you fall off the bonnet, earlier."

Gwen bit her lips and looked away. Whoops.

"Turn left here," Jack said suddenly, and she had to slam on the brakes to take the turn with any amount of safety. Jack had gripped the bar above him, but poor Simran fell over in the backseat with a squeak.

"Sorry," she said into backseat. To Jack, she added, "New route?"

"Different destination. Take a right up here." Jack pressed his comm. "Owen? Yeah, not caring about hospital zones right now. Remember the secure loft by Blaidd Drwg?" Gwen touched her own comm and listened to the conversation.

"We haven't used that since Operation Goldenrod." Owen didn't sound too happy, though what he wasn't happy about could have been anything. He could have his hand in a woodchipper, or be tying his shoes, or be in the middle of a surgical procedure. She suspected that Owen didn't like to be reminded of Goldenrod. She'd read the files.

Jack glanced out the window. "Yeah, well, it's secure, and we have a person who needs a place to stay." He looked down at his wrist strap, not really doing anything, but rather playing with the flap that covered the console. "I need you to meet us there."

"Is it Simran Parikh, by any chance?" Tosh asked, and Gwen's head jerked a little in surprise. She'd forgotten that Tosh would be listening in too. She took another turn as Jack wordlessly pointed and found herself in the area by the power plant.

"Got it in one," Jack said, his eyes busily watching the passing buildings.

"Her body is here, but it's _not_ her," Tosh said, her voice soft. Gwen realised that she hadn't spoken to Tosh since this all happened. She wondered if she should. She wondered if they had anything to talk about. It just seemed that since they were the only women, well, they should have something to say about all of this. Gwen stared at her hands on the steering wheel, firmly on ten and two. Jesus, they were huge. She couldn't get over that.

Owen snorted; it was unmistakably him. "All right. We're done here. I'll drop Tosh and head over." The comms beeped as he clicked out.

"Jack," Tosh said, her voice measured. "What do we do next?"

Jack shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know," he said finally, after a few long seconds in which Gwen grew increasingly worried. "Let's hope that Ianto comes up with something."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Do you have any preferences, anything in particular that you're looking for?"

Ianto smiled at the woman, whose nametag read Gladys. "No, I'm still trying to decide what type of dog I'd like." _Do you have one that feeds, washes and walks itself?_ was what he wanted to ask. That was his type of dog.

It wasn't that Ianto didn't like dogs, it was just that he wasn't the kind of person to care for one. They needed a schedule, and he couldn't provide that, not with his job. And they seemed to need constant care. They had to be walked, and let out and cleaned up after. Lisa had had a cat, and he'd rather liked that, because Gamera had sat on his bare feet when he watched the telly, and was capable of self-feeding and didn't want walkies. And Lisa had changed the litter, so he figured that he benefited from the cat but had none of the responsibilities.

He'd had to take Gamera to a shelter when Lisa. Well, when they'd gone back to Cardiff.

Gladys hugged her clipboard to her chest. "Well, then, we have a questionnaire you can fill out that will help us narrow down what you're looking for."

Ianto took the clipboard from her and glanced at it: 'Do you live in a flat or a house?' 'Describe the hours that you keep.' 'How many hours do you have to spend with your dog?'

He snorted. _A flat, horrendous, none._ Out loud, he said, "Excellent. But," he paused, trying to look charming. He'd seen Jack do it dozens of times, and it seemed to work. Hell, he fell for it all the time, and he wasn't what he would call a pushover. "I was hoping to look about, see some of the dogs. You know, pet them." Oh dear. That sounded rather perved.

Gladys grinned. "That's a wonderful idea. I suggest you fill out the questionnaire, and then we can introduce you to some of our potential adoptees."

Ianto sighed. Apparently, the Jack Harkness patented charm only worked for him. He leant on the counter, set the clipboard down, and proceeded to fabricate a scenario in which he had tonnes of time so spend with a canine companion in his life.

Thirty minutes later, he was standing in a vast array of cages, runs, they called them, outside, amidst a veritable menagerie of dogs. There had to be at least fifty of them. He glanced about, wondering just how he would be able to tell that a dog was possessed of an alien consciousness, and not just, well, a dog. Inquiries to Jack, who claimed to have worked with one of them before, had led to an evasive song and dance regarding a Universal Translator. As if this was Star Trek.

He had memorised a few choice phrases in Xarxian that they had in the language database, but well, Xarxians had two voice boxes, and he wasn't sure that he wasn't going to be able to pull it off with any amount of certainty. With his current run of luck, all of the dogs would treat his attempts at alien language as some sort of mating call.

The image of being swarmed by Bull Mastiffs in heat clouded his vision. Disturbing.

He turned back to Gladys. "I saw one, a Rottweiler, on your website—"

Gladys frowned. "Oh, you mean Muffles."

"That's the one."

"I'm afraid that Muffles is under the weather right now. I'd not want to place her with you. If you're set on her, through, you could check in next week and see if she's made any improvement." She smiled. "She's usually very gentle and outgoing."

Ianto watched a throng of small excitable dogs follow him along the fencing of the walk. "That's a shame," he said honestly. Muffles was one of the suspected Xarxian-possessed dogs, along with a newly laconic 'Merlin,' and a Jack Russell called 'Wee Jock' who had suddenly decided that he was interested in eating rings of keys.

"What happened there?" he asked, pointing to a roped off area where several runs had torn fencing, leaving gaping holes in the chain links. Holes that looked to have been torn from the inside out.

Gladys smiled nervously. "Oh, there was an incident with some vandals a few nights ago. Just minor damage, and none of our precious ones were injured or wandered off, bless."

Ianto had seen the police report. He'd been able to mesh it up with the disappearance of Simran Parikh and the curious case of Dylan Smith.

If Gladys wasn't going to let him see Muffles, then she certainly wasn't going to show him any of the erratically-behaving dogs. He'd wasted his time coming in covertly.

The shelter was off on the edge of Bute Park, so that one could conceivably approach the back from the park itself, and then by that logic one could walk out the back of the shelter and directly into the park, which was probably what the Xarxians had done. The Xarxian-dogs. What should they call them? Xogs? Oh dear God no.

"I'm very sorry to hear that," he said as earnestly as possible. He hadn't heard from anyone else about the state of Dylan Smith or Simran Parikh, but in his skull, ideas were starting to percolate, all of them unsettling. A proximity body swap, a group of aliens, dozens upon dozens of dogs, and two humans in the mix. He made eye contact with a particularly soulful looking Basset Hound and allowed himself to speculate for a second.

"Perhaps you can wander," Gladys said, tapping her clipboard on her knee. She kept looking back to the door they'd come from, as if she had other things to be doing. "I've a million things to do. Some of our employees have taken holiday and I'm completely swamped."

Ianto smiled. This was what he had been waiting for. "Absolutely." He nodded. "I'll just poke about, see if there's anyone who strikes my fancy."

God, he just couldn't escape the perversion today.

After Gladys had scurried away, Ianto crouched down in front of a very still dog that looked like a cross between a Border collie and a mammoth. He tried a few lines in Xarxian, which all sounded rather like, "Eeeeearrrrr raaaagth thewwwwwwwww. K." The dog growled and backed away and Ianto sighed; what did that mean?

He stood and stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets. This was impossible. Well, he needed to find Muffles and Wee Jock and whomever else they had in hiding. He glanced about, looking for secret entrances. Perhaps a big sign marked "QUARANTINED ANIMALS—DO NOT TOUCH."

He was thinking about venturing out into the park from the back of the kennel when a flash of movement caught his eye outside the cages. There hadn't been anyone back here with him and Gladys as far as he knew, and it seemed to be a rather pearly, whitish pink that could either indicate that someone had a taste for pastels, lamé or…

Ianto rounded the kennels in time to see a long arm slip around the back corner of the kennel building and into an alleyway that led out onto the street front. Ianto pulled his stun gun from his pocket. So he hadn't been able to examine the dogs, but that didn't mean that the trip could be a total waste. He tapped the scanner to make sure that it was safe in its case in his pocket, just in case this got rough.

He turned the corner carefully, clearing the space in the alleyway five feet in front of him. The Xarxian was about ten metres away, digging about in a skip. He readied the stun gun, crept closer to it, and then accidentally stepped in a puddle. The Xarxian's head came up, and it stared at him for a second before lumbering out of the skip and starting towards him.

Ianto backed away, down the alley the way he'd come, but something behind him made him turn. Another Xarxian. He was blocked in. "Oh, bollocks," he muttered, fingering his stun gun and readying the trigger.

The Xarxian lowered its head and charged, looking to head butt him, it seemed, and he raised the stun gun just in time to deliver a hit dead center to the chest. He ground the gun into the creature and pulled the trigger, feeling the thing jolt against him when the volts ripped through it. He gave it a good shove and let it fall backward down to the ground before turning quickly to catch the other Xarxian. His hand hit its forearm and was knocked away. The stun gun clattered to the side of the alleyway.

Oh, bollocks again.

The Xarxian fell onto him with it’s upper body, its hands or rather, claws, settling on his shoulders as they toppled backwards, on top of the other fallen Xarxian, incidentally. He was in the middle of an alien sandwich, and it was not at all like Jack had ever described.

Ianto looked at the Xarxian's dental work with a fair amount of panic. His hands scrabbled in the gravel and dirt of the alleyway for anything he could use as a weapon. He would have preferred a bat, an asp, Excalibur, perhaps, but he would have settled for a board or a rather stale baguette, actually. Anything. He brought up one of his hands and tried to punch the creature in the chest, but it didn't seem impressed with the impact.

The thing's breath was quite rancid. What the hell had it been eating? Ianto closed his eyes and tried to protect his neck, just in case. He prayed that it wouldn't just want to bite into his face and rip. Oh, that was pleasant.

He braced himself for the…wetness? running up his cheek. The Xarxian pressed its hands into his shoulders, pinning him down, and then lathed his face with its tongue, growling softly.

Ianto opened his eyes. "Oh hey," he said, and the Xarxian panted. " _Oh._ Oh, you." He reached up and ran his hand down the Xarxian's damp, bald head. The creature closed its eyes and a string of drool came from its mouth and landed on Ianto's tie.

He laughed with relief. "Oh good boy. Good, good boy."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"You know," Gwen heard her own voice say, "I'm surprised."

Gwen turned, and the wind and the coat and her different everything almost made her lose her balance. After she'd left Simran in the care of Jack and Owen, she'd taken the SUV to the shelter and helped Ianto cart the two canine-possessed Xarxians back to the Hub. Then she'd gone out to petrol up the vehicle, but she hadn't felt like going back yet.

She'd come up here for some peace and quiet, and while she normally didn't stand on the roof and well, do this, it seemed right and proper. Earlier, she'd let herself up to the top of the Millennium Center and walked as far to the edge as she could. It still hadn't seemed enough, so here she was, a ways away, all the way out on the Altolusso's front strut, surprised at how easy it was to just, well _stand_ here.

Moving in any way was a different matter.

Even in a different body, Jack was as nimble as ever, crossing the building struts with his (her) hands in his pockets. He'd done a better job of managing her appearance today, and she didn't look quite so much like a ragamuffin. The pigtails were a bit much, though; he'd probably let Tosh do his hair.

"Oh," she said, "I was just doing a little bit of the Jack Harkness Experience." She stared back out over the city. It was brilliant, especially with the sun hitting the bay, and the sky a jewel blue. She decidedly didn't look down. She wondered if anyone could see them up here. The wind carded her hair and she shivered.

Jack stood next to her and smiled. "Sometimes I really am shocked to hear those Welsh vowels coming out of my mouth."

"You're telling me," she muttered.

"Hey wait—" Jack rolled his eyes up in thought. "Dumpster. Trunk. Hood. Oh, _I_ know." He winked at her. _"Soccer."_

She laughed, and somewhere below them, a car horn sounded, long and shrill, as if it got the joke too. "Skip. Boot. Bonnet. _Football._ "

Jack's eyes crinkled, and he stared off out into the horizon. "That was a lark."

Gwen shifted her weight and shoved her hands in her pockets, her version of the last 'fuck off' to the fear that had overwhelmed her standing up here alone. Jack rocked back and forth on his feet dangerously, enough to make her more than a little nervous. She reached out and stilled him.

"Stop. Just stop."

Jack stayed stationary but nudged her with his elbow. "You know, there's one more part of The Jack Harkness Experience—"

"I'm not blowing Ianto," she shot back.

Jack was unfazed. "Well, there is _that_ , but…." His voice trailed off before he shook himself a little. Gwen was worried that he might slip on the strut and she would have to watch herself tumbling to her death; the thought flipped her stomach for more than one reason.

"I wouldn't blame you if you tried it," Jack continued, still not looking at her. "After all, it is an ability that is singularly mine—"

"No."

"And if you wondered what, hell, I'd wonder if our positions were reversed—"

"Jack—"

"You know, any more than they already are reversed right now."

Gwen unclenched her hands from the balls they'd formed in her pockets and forced them to lay flat against her thighs; her legs rocked as she adjusted her balance for the coat that billowed behind her in the wind. It was surprising how much easier it was now that she was taller and had much larger shoes.

Jack ignored her and closed his eyes; she'd never followed him up to the top of this building, not in her own body. What had she been afraid of? Well, falling, yes, the sudden stop, most certainly. But now.

"As far as deaths go," Jack said, lowering himself to the strut in a crouch and sitting, dangling his feet from the edge, "falling is pretty neat. The trip down is terrifying and spectacular, you know, until the end, but that part is over pretty quickly."

Gwen lowered herself much slower than Jack had, but managed to settle herself next to him, the coat hanging off the back of the support behind her; the lining was too slippery for her to feel confident sitting on it up here. She'd already slid off the bonnet of the SUV earlier today. In front of the police station. She figured she'd be more amused that the police thought Jack was a klutz once she was safe back in her own body.

"I can't," she said, a little less forcefully than she'd intended. Sometimes, like the other morning, when Jack thought he had a good idea, he tended to push it a little too hard. She was prepared for an argument, for a discussion about what they had been avoiding ever since she'd been up half the night and Jack had apparently been sacked out in his bunk, snoring softly.

That was it—no one could be sure that Jack's immortality was tied to Jack's body, per se, and not the essence of Jack, as it were, not even Jack. Even knowing that she only had four days left in this body, the idea of Jack trapped forever in her body chilled her. Or the thought of being trapped in Jack's body forever. Dear Lord.

Jack didn't have time to reply, because both of their phones went off simultaneously. The display read 'Torchwood. Call ASAP.'

Gwen sighed. In truth, she was ready to go back down to earth, but she didn't want to say it aloud. Jack was already headed back to the roof proper, and she followed him; she couldn't resist putting her arms out on either side to ensure her balance. This had been a bad idea, really, but she hadn't been able to stop herself, and no one had died, so she had to count it as a success, one more notch to put on her belt, along with 'urinating standing up' and 'not wearing a bra to work.'

Jack scuffed the gravel on the rooftop with his trainers and she turned away from him; he was distracting, and that wasn't his fault, but she found that she had trouble concentrating when he was prancing about, light on the balls of his feet, apparently _not wearing a bra either_ , Jesus, and trying to whistle with two fingers in his mouth.

"Tosh?" she said after she'd inserted her earpiece.

"Ja—er, Gwen, I think we might have an idea about how to identify the displaced Xarxians, but we're not entirely sure that we have the theory correct. Can you come back?"

Gwen glanced at Jack. "Yeah, I think. Jack's here." Jack waved at her, and she shook her head. Still unnerving. "Want us both?"

"I should think so," Tosh clipped. "We'll wait for you two before we go any further." The signal dropped as Tosh hung up, and Gwen tapped her earpiece.

"Big trouble in little Cardiff?" he asked, amused with his own quip. Gwen rolled her eyes and pocketed the earpiece. Jack's earpiece was big and it distracted her when she was walking about. Jack could wear hers all the time if he wanted, but she wasn't going so far to complete the illusion of 'Jackness' by wearing it.

"Not as such. I think Tosh and the others have a way to identify the dogs in the shelter that are…" she trailed off, mostly because she was distracted by…by nothing. A kind of lull in energy took her suddenly, or perhaps it just felt like the world was moving too slowly, and just relaying things she already knew was exhausting and boring. Jack had been listening to the conversation, she knew he had. Even if he was pretending that he hadn't. Was he treating her body like a holiday from command? Or only when it suited him?

"More than meets the eye," he finished for her, and she shook her head. Ianto had to stop feeding Jack bad action sci-fi movies. She walked to the rooftop door; Jack fell into step with her.

"Hey," Jack said as he held the door for her, "where are you in your cycle?"

She stopped in her tracks. They were not having _this_ conversation. "What?"

"It's just—these jeans are a little bit tight today, and I thought—"

"Oi! Maybe if you'd stop shoving those pasties down my gullet, they'd fit!"

Jack grinned. "Well, that's good then. The last time I had my period, I was a raving bitch." He waved a hand at the open door and bowed a little. "Ladies first."

Gwen rolled her eyes. Behind her, Jack snorted.

"Heh. I said 'Oi'."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When they got back to the Hub, they found Ianto, Owen and Toshiko milling about the lounge area. Owen laughed as Tosh cursed and wound a string around something in her hand. Ianto was Walking The Dog with a yo-yo. A yo-yo that shot coloured sparks and hissed and whistled when it rotated on the end of its string.

Gwen felt herself laugh before the sound came out. "The Space Yo-yos again?" she asked.

Tosh threaded her finger through the loop at the end of the luminescent string. "I swear, I've got it this time," she said, then launched her yo-yo to the end of its string, spinning in place, sparks shooting from the spherical ball. It fizzled in a shower of red and blue and she cursed. Ianto snapped his yo-yo into his hand, smirked and proceeded to walk out onto the Hub grating, maneuvering the toy into an Around The World with a rainbow of colours.

Jack took the yo-yo from Tosh's hand and wound the string. "I thought we'd filed these in the Archives," he said disapprovingly.

"We did, but I think they might be useful." Ianto turned, spun out his yo-yo, and used his other hand's fingers to make a loop in the string and spin the globe around and through in a complicated series of gestures. The sparks that shot out from the yo-yo were vaguely hypnotic. Even Jack stopped to watch.

"That's fantastic," Owen said.

"It's called a Chain Reaction," Ianto said, watching the yo-yo with amusedly bright eyes. Gwen had to admit, the effect was stunning. "Thank you, internet tutorials."

"Ianto, you continue to have hidden depths," Jack mused.

Ianto's mouth quirked as the yo-yo zipped back into his hand. Smoke wafted past his face and he waved it away. "Misspent youth," he sighed.

"Right," Jack said, taking the yo-yo from Ianto and shoving the box under one arm. "I find it hard to believe that you'd call us back for this, as interesting as it is."

Owen put his feet up on the coffee table and his hands behind his head. "We've got two displaced people, two aliens possessed by dogs, three dead feral aliens who were probably dogs, and a kennel full of pups who could be aliens. And their Geelucks started a hell of a lot sooner than yours did."

Tosh tapped the side of her leg with her pen. "Exactly. Saturday should be the day that the Geelucks are up for Dylan, and Simran and everyone in that group. Two things could happen."

Jack poked at the yo-yos in the box. "They could all spontaneously switch, which would be extremely convenient."

And too good to be true. Gwen had learned that if something could go wrong with alien tech, it usually did. In their faces. "Or nothing could happen," she finished for him.

"Or only some of them could switch back," Ianto finished. "Though that would be troublesome and perplexing." He scowled at the box under Jack's arm. Sometimes he was like a four-year-old.

Owen cleared his throat. "In line with all of this switching back and forth," he said, waving a hand like a swimming fin. "Do you reckon that all the bodies have to be near for it to work?" Gwen felt her stomach drop as he continued. "I mean, say there's a proximity to the switching, and then there's a deadline, and then there's well, the fact that some of the bodies are, well, dead." He shrugged.

No one said anything for a moment, and than Jack turned to Ianto. "You haven't—"

Ianto shoved his hands in his pockets. "Nope. All three still on ice."

Jack sighed. "Oh good. I guess to be on the safe side, we should make sure that we get everyone in a room at the same time, right?"

Tosh turned towards the box, sitting on her desk, and pulled the tea cozy off. "I think I can manage to get some more information, but I might have to call Archie and hack into UNIT." She grinned. "That's always a good time."

Jack shook the box of space yo-yos, and a plume of sparks blossomed over its open lid. "And this? Are these part of your dastardly plan?" He looked at Ianto. "I warned you about these."

"They're shiny," Ianto said, snatching the box from under Jack's arm. "And they're harmless." He smiled wryly. "You just don't like them because you're rubbish at it."

Jack stared at the box before shrugging. "That's hard to deny."

Ianto shook the box, smiling when the shower of sparks turned magenta. "They're _shiny_ , Jack. And you can see them in the dark. Just the kind of thing you might want when trying to track down a lumbering alien who is _attracted to shiny things_."

Jack smiled. "And if the aliens are inside a bunch of Yorkies?"

Ianto looked back down at the box and frowned. Gwen realised that he'd made a fatal error. He must have seen it too, because he shrugged. "The best game of fetch ever, then."

Tosh waved her equipment. "Or we could just use the scanner and trace the residual energy from the machine."

Ianto's mouth twitched. "Or we could do that." He shoved the box back at Jack but snagged a yo-yo and stuffed it into his pocket. "But I'm keeping this."

Jack walked to the stairs leading to his office. "Then you go and do that. Gwen, call DI Swanson and tell her that we're all settled here with the evidence and that we'll send it over in the morning."

Gwen frowned. "Evidence? We have evidence?" Jack didn't answer her, but waved a dismissive hand and he shut the door to his office behind him.

Tosh tossed the scanner to Ianto. "I'm allergic."

"I'll go with you," Owen said, and everyone turned to look at him. He shrugged. "What? I like dogs."

As they headed out the door, Gwen dropped her frame onto the sofa and put her head in her hands. Tosh perched on the edge next to her and smiled, her hands resting lightly on her knees.

"So," Tosh asked conspiratorially, eyes wide, "what's it like, you know, having—" She gestured to Gwen's pants.

Gwen rolled her eyes. "It's a miracle men get anything done."

"Jesus, Gwen!" Jack called as he jumped down the stairs and walked through the Hub. "Is your bladder the size of a walnut? I have to pee again!"

Gwen tipped her head back into the sofa and groaned.

Tosh sighed. "If I was a man, I'd fuck _everything_."

Gwen smiled. "I think this body already has."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ianto dried his hands with a towel as he stood in the center of the Hub and stared off into space. Tosh had to wonder what he was thinking about. She followed his gaze to see if she could define the source of his musing, but his eyes were glued to the tiles of the wall, as if he were looking through them.

Owen had taken the SUV back over to the safe house and Simran, with the dogs. Well, Xarxian-dogs. Jack had agreed that they shouldn’t lock them in the cells, and Ianto had explained in a clipped tone over the comm that they were all rather dog-like, and that he was _more than sure_ that Simran could manage to take care of them adequately, what with her _being a veterinarian and all_. He might have even dropped in a threat to book off ill for the rest of the week if Jack forced him to look after all the dogs and the dogs in the Xarxian bodies (Tosh secretly called them Xogs in her head; it was cute.)

He had also told them all that they were not going to call them Xogs, because that was just silly and demeaning.

Owen had picked up the eight (eight! Where were all the Xarxians, then? There were three out there in the loose!) of the dogs and was en-route to the safe house when Tosh made her breakthrough and jumped from her seat.

She sought out Jack and found him down in Owen's autopsy bay, opening and closing the drawers in search of something. He apparently had been looking for medical tape, but when he noticed her watching him, he jumped and pocketed the roll quickly. "What've you got? Tell me it's definitive and will solve all our problems."

"You are in luck," Tosh said as she leaned over the railing of the autopsy theatre. "The proximity circuit is there, but the deadline isn't a firm window. It's a deadline."

Jack came up the steps and threw an arm around her shoulder. Tosh leaned into it for a second. Jack was easier to see in Gwen than Gwen was to see in Jack. Did that even make sense? "What does that mean, then?"

She smiled. "That you don't have to worry about having everyone collected and shoved into Dylan's hospital room or wherever by Saturday." She pointed to the screen, on which her Q'Nog translation was running. It was difficult, because the sibilant underscores and the glottal stops didn't have an equivalent symbol on her keyboard and she was having to draw them in with the light pen when she wanted to work with them in the text. "I figure that once we track down the last three Xarxians running about, we can put them all together when it's more convenient."

Jack squeezed her shoulder. "Toshiko, you are a beautiful genius." To Gwen he added. "You are also a beautiful genius, but Toshiko deserves it more right now."

Gwen rolled her eyes. "How do we get those last three Xarxians?" she asked Tosh, ignoring Jack to lean against the edge of Tosh's desk. It wobbled with her weight and she righted herself and settled for crossing her arms across her chest.

Tosh looked at the CCTV feeds from Bute Park. "I've cross-referenced all the reports, plus the few sightings that I was able to get on screen, but it's over a ten mile radius, and the last report was Tuesday night, so I don't have any new datum." She shrugged. "We could go out looking for them, or wait until they make appearances and sweep the area."

Jack ran a hand over his face, and his lipstick smeared. "Yeah, okay, that's a little ridiculous." And when her face fell, he shook his head. "That's a lot of space to cover. What about that scanner we used at Dylan Smith's and at the kennel? Couldn't we use that?"

"My yo-yo idea is looking better and better," Ianto said from across the Hub. He'd retrieved his yo-yo and was busy trying to do something that was a combination of a slingshot and apparently, The Monkey.

Tosh frowned. "Those aren't addictive, are they?" The last thing they all needed was a team member addicted to another alien toy. Owen and the alien pogs had been quite enough for her.

Jack sighed and watched him with what looked like wistfulness. "Only if you're seven, apparently."

Gwen left their group to saunter back towards the autopsy theatre, but she was deep in thought. "If we could track them, we could just pick them all up right now and have done with it on Saturday. Like that." She snapped her fingers.

Tosh hated to burst her bubble. "Not exactly. The scanner would be useful if you were trying to detect them from a five-foot distance, maybe, but it doesn't have a range. It's meant for scanning bodies that are, well, already in front of you." She smiled; sometimes she liked being the beautiful genius. "I could rewire it," she offered. "You know, give it more power."

Jack nodded. "Excellent," he said, clapping his hands once and rubbing them together. He glanced at his watch, seemed surprised to see Gwen's smaller version on his wrist, and then shrugged. "Is this going to take you all night?"

Tosh shrugged. "Not exactly. I have to upload the data and then expand the code. Extrapolate the…." She drifted off when Jack's eyes glazed over. "It has to work overnight," she said feebly. "I have to unspool the code and rethread it for a wider radius." There, she'd got it out. She knew that sometimes the things she said didn't exactly go over Jack's head –he'd obviously forgotten things about alien tech that she couldn't even begin to understand—but he wasn't following her terminology. Maybe it was a language barrier. Was English even his first language?

Jack stuck his hands in his back pockets, a maneuver that made Gwen's chest stick out. It was a nice chest, Tosh thought. He winked at her and shook it. Behind him, Gwen's eyes narrowed.

"Tosh, make it so." Good god, had Ianto been showing him bad action sci-fi films again? What did they do in their free time? "Gwen, what was it you wanted to ask me earlier?"

Gwen pulled him by the arm, away from Tosh and closer to the medical bay. It wasn't far enough away that Tosh couldn't hear them if she typed _exteremly_ quietly. Gwen sighed and leaned towards Jack. "The 'Jack Harkness Experience' has stalled," she said cryptically. "There are some…issues."

Tosh leaned back and watched them in the reflection of her monitor. So what? She was inexplicably interested in Jack and Gwen this week. She didn't have issues of her own, not at all.

Jack was facing her, so she could see his eyebrow quirk. "Oh really? Anything that might require a tutorial?"

Gwen smacked his arm, and he staggered. Tosh shook her head; Gwen had to stop cuffing people. "Strictly academically." She shoved her hands into her pockets and leaned against the railing. "We could get a curry and discuss it over dinner."

Jack smiled. "Ah. _Strictly academically._ Right. Tosh, is that data…extrapolating to the principle of the….the basic setting of the manipulator…?" Tosh snorted; Jack did that to her when he knew that there was no way he was going to be able to repeat what she had told him earlier. When he did it, it was charming. When Owen tried it, she usually threw things at him.

She fiddled with a few more keys and jacked the scanner into the USB port. A few timed sequences, and her screens flickered in yellow and green code, scrolling faster than she could actually see, but the glimpses that she could make out showed the right strings.

"It's all set," she said, turning. A glance at her own watch showed that it was seven thirty-eight.

Jack smiled at her. "Go home."

She blinked. What? "What?" Ianto came down from one of the upper levels and stood there with her as Gwen and Jack both smiled in ghostly mirror images, though Gwen had a bit of an apologetic air about her.

Jack shrugged. "Gwen and I can take care of anything that pops up, and we have some things to do, so—"

Ianto set his files down on the nearest surface. "What things?" he asked suspiciously. Not just another pretty face, Ianto Jones. Tosh was starting to get the picture pretty clearly.

Gwen held her hands out. "Not…that, Ianto. Just, body switching things that we both…" she glanced at Jack.

Jack shrugged. "…have to work out?" he finished, making it a question.

"Like a project?" Gwen added.

Jack pointed at her. "Like a project. Exactly." Then they both smiled. It was unnerving.

They sat down on the sofa simultaneously. Ianto frowned, and Tosh had to pity him. Having Jack in Gwen's body sitting there, grinning next to Jack's actual body, also grinning, it was like looking at two Jacks. One was quite enough, actually.

"We'll be fine," Gwen said. Jack leant over and laid his head on her shoulder, and then she tilted hers so that it rested on his. They looked like some terrifyingly conspiratorial Normal Rockwell painting. Not remotely comforting.

The thought about what they might have planned for the evening made Tosh tilt her own head. 'The Jack Harkness Experience', indeed. Was monogamy off them menu when you weren't in your own body? Was monogamy off the menu when the person you were sleeping with was, well, you?

She decided to save the question for later, when she'd had a glass of wine. Perhaps two.

"Yeah," Jack affirmed, blinking and waving his hand in a shooing motion. "Go on, scram. Scat. Flee for your lives."

 

 **THURSDAY**

 _If they ever come up with a swashbuckling school, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something._ (Jack Handey)

Gwen woke up and tasted fur. An experimental hand to the face revealed that the fur was less like actual fur and more like one of the Hub sofa cushions, and it was wedged in her mouth. She tossed it aside and rolled upright as much as she was able to with a head that felt as if it was a bowl of porridge. She might have felt a physical clicking sensation when she turned her neck.

She was in the hole under Jack's office. Gwen blinked a few times in the dimness and then fumbled for the lamp on the bedstead. The bulb was bare and the light bored into her skull for a second, mostly because she had been dumb enough to look at it as she turned it on.

How many scotches had she had?

It was a slow and tiring trip up the ladder to Jack's office. She probably should have dressed or changed or whatever, but she was more than a little curious as to how she'd ended up down there, fully clothed, with a sofa cushion on her face. As soon as she reached the top, Gwen remembered the sofa cushion and looked back down at it, sitting there on the camp bed. Oh, whatever. She waved a hand to no one and stumbled into the main atrium.

No one was in sight, and a trip by Tosh's workstation revealed that her purse was there, and the display read six-thirty. Why had they let her sleep? She shuffled to the sofa and sat down, slamming her back into the portion without a cushion. Figured.

"Good morning!" Tosh sang as she emerged from the kitchen. "Ianto's left you a pot of coffee!" She smiled sympathetically. "Jack looked rather like he'd been hit by a bus. Are you any better?"

Gwen sighed and put her head in her hands.

 

 _"How many of these have I had?" Jack asked, examining the lipstick on his glass. "You use the wrong shade, you know. You need something with more fire."_

 _Gwen shrugged. "I'm busy. Haven't had my colours done since…ever." They sprawled on the sofa and grasped scotch glasses, feet up on the coffee table. Jack's trainer was in a plate of curry._

 _Jack snorted. "Colours." Then he turned his head to her. "So, you want to ask about my cock."_

 _Gwen felt the scotch go up the back of her nose, and it wasn't pleasant. She shot forward, snorting and coughing. Jack ineffectually slapped her on the back. Lord it_ burned _. When she was reasonably subdued, she fell backwards and confronted the conversation head-on. "Yes, your cock."_

 _Jack finished his scotch and leaned forward to pour another. "It's a nice cock. I know." He winked. "You saw how it works yesterday. Do you want another demonstration?" He licked his lips and sipped from his glass, eyebrows up as if asking a question._

 _Gwen looked at her lips on the glass and considered; she was wearing the wrong shade. "No," she decided aloud. "I do not." And then she finished her drink. She'd had three of these, and she didn't feel drunk. Maybe she was. Maybe she needed more._

 _Jack sighed. "All right then. The answer you are looking for is no, wanking does not prevent erection, and no, thinking about gross stuff will not make you soft faster."_

 _"How did you—"_

 _Jack looked at her, and she shut up. "It's my cock. You know--" Hand wave. "--most of the time."_

 

"Gwen? Are you all right?" Tosh waved a hand in front of her face and she started. Tosh's face was one of concern, and she proffered a cup of coffee in Jack's striped mug. Both of their eyes fell on it, and Gwen wondered if it had been deliberate. No, of course not. It was an accident. Tosh smiled weakly when Gwen took the mug and sipped from it. "You look terrible."

That was probably true. Gwen had no idea what she looked like, couldn't even imagine it. She ran a hand through her hair—did she have bed head? A self-check assessment/inventory revealed that she didn't have a hangover _per se_ , just a bit of grogginess, and a very very bad taste in her mouth. She accepted the coffee and sipped it; it didn't make the bad taste better. She was going to have to use Jack's toothbrush. The thought seemed gross, until she realised, oh yeah, Jack.

She made a mental note to replace her toothbrush at home.

Tosh left her side and returned to her workstation and her own coffee. "The others already left on a retrieval," she said over her shoulder. "Jack looked about as bad as you do. But he said you should feel free to use the showers and his room, you know." She gestured generically in the direction of Jack's living space. "For. Obvious reasons."

Gwen looked down at her rumpled clothes. Her top shirt was impossibly wrinkled and unbuttoned. She had curry on Jack's vest. Oops. Her braces were wrapped around one leg, and she wondered how that had even happened.

 

 _"I can't believe that I've never thought about these things," she moaned._

 _Jack shrugged. "If you want any consolation, I don't think much about the daily workings of your vagina." Just him saying the word was obscene. "Like, tell me, are you always this wet? Is this a girl thing? Is this_ your _girl thing?" Jack unbuttoned his denims and stuck his hand in._

 _Gwen watched him do it, reclining on the sofa, his denims open, his hand thrusting into (hopefully) panties to feel the area. Jack's face was lost in concentration, academic, and he removed his fingers and brought them up her face. "See? Really wet." He smiled. "That's just the way you are, isn't it?" He wiped his hand on his denims and Gwen finished her drink. "If not, then obviously I've been doing something wrong."_

 _"No," she said, glancing away. "That's just me."_

 _Jack picked up his own glass. "Hrm." He licked his finger before taking a drink. "Have you noticed things taste different?"_

 

Gwen stood unsteadily and walked to Tosh's workspace, bypassing a discarded takeaway bag on the floor. There were curried footprints from Jack's trainers that led to Gwen's workstation, probably from where he'd been looking at whatever they'd been called out for.

"Hrrrngh," she said as she steadied herself on the desk. Tosh smiled and shook her head.

"I don't think Jack drinks much." Then, as if she couldn't help herself, "Did you two, _you know_?"

Gwen sipped her coffee and shared a conspiratorial wink with Tosh. Tosh was all right.

 

 _Jack was pretty drunk. He set his glass down on what he thought was the coffee table but what was really the air next to the coffee table. The glass landed on the concrete with a shattering noise. Gwen laughed, and_ that _noise startled her._

 _"Woah, we should make this thing longer," Jack told her. "Ianto should get us one big enough to hold the drunk."_

 _"You and Ianto," she said suddenly, "is this a—"_

 _Jack fell against her a little and ran a hand up her chest. Gwen had to turn away, because the sensation stirred her cock, and she didn’t want to go there. Not with herself. Not drunk, and not now._

 _Jack apparently did. "We could have sex," Jack offered, smiling.. His fingers walked up her chest to her neck and lay there, on her throat. Gwen closed her eyes and then opened them, because she was afraid that Jack would try to kiss her when she wasn't paying attention. At least he wasn’t digging into her trousers._

 _"No," she told him, pushing at his body a little. Her body. Oh fuck. She was starting to have trouble thinking, and it occurred to her that all those years in which she'd regarded men sceptically when they referred to sexual haze, she hadn't known what the fuck they were talking about. The booze probably wasn't helping. "No, I don't think."_

 _Jack pulled back and flopped to the other side of the sofa then. "Yeah, I didn't think so," he replied, face mild. "I was just throwing it out there."_

 _She sighed. "It's just, the shower, and it wasn't, and I—"_

 _"Gwen, Gwen," Jack said, waving a hand around like he was directing traffic and everyone was supposed to move to the right. "It's all right." His hand hit the table and he yelped. "God, I think I broke a nail."_

 _Gwen ignored him, instead setting her glass down. "I think we covered it all, but you know the others will never believe that we didn't have a go," she groaned. She hadn't thought about the others until now._

 _"Well, if you change your mind, let me know." Jack yawned. "I'm just gonna close my eyes. Mmmm, spinny."_

 

She must have fallen asleep, because Gwen didn't recall anything after that. Maybe it had been the scotch, or the curry, or just relief at hearing Jack snoring (softly!) on the other end of the sofa, but Gwen had slept hard, and apparently not heard Jack leave, or Ianto come in, or Owen.

That was a relief.

Gwen downed the rest of her coffee and walked away from Tosh's workstation as she talked. "A retrieval? They find another Xarxian?"

Tosh sat back and picked up her breakfast—what looked to be a croissant with chocolate. Gwen sighed. She could use one of those herself. "Yeah," she said to Gwen. "A dead one."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"You know what I hate?"

"A mystery?"

Jack nodded. "A myst—no wait, I like mysteries." He glanced at Ianto, who was holding a plastic body bag over the alien's feet as Owen prepared to lift them. "I was gonna say that I don't like eviscerated aliens on my doorstep."

Owen dropped the Xarxian's lower half onto the body bag under it. "We're in Splott. That's hardly our doorstep." He glanced up and frowned that the rumble of thunder in the distance. "Sodding Cardiff rain…."

Ianto nodded. "He's right. The Plass would, technically, be our doorstep." Then the corner of his mouth twitched, like it did when he thought he was being clever. "The Tourist Office would figuratively be--well. You get the idea."

Owen glanced up. "I thought that was the invisible lift?"

Ianto tilted his head in consideration. "You might have a point."

Jack crossed his arms and tried to frown, but it was amusing to watch Owen struggle with a body that was larger than his own. "You two have no appreciation for a good line."

Ianto began zipping up the body bag, but stopped at the knees when Owen waved his hands away, attention caught by the lacerations on the chest and stomach. "I have plenty of appreciation for good lines, when I hear them." Ianto shook his head and smiled at Jack. "And by the way, this is still a mystery."

Jack sighed. He was right about that. They had got the call early that morning. In fact, that the police had called them at all (the police _hated_ calling them; Jack could always hear the bile in the PCs' throats when they relayed that Torchwood's assistance would be _greatly appreciated_ at a crime scene) was something of a signal about what a mystery this was.

Jack looked at the Xarxian lying in the plastic bag and wondered what the police had thought it was. It was hard to explain that away—some aliens could be attributed to rabid animals or, he was rather ashamed to admit, circus freaks. The Xarxian, with its rubbery, glowing skin and elongated limbs, couldn’t pass for either of those. They had brought a few carafes of coffee, styro cups and a healthy selection of Retcons four through seven.

"These cuts," Owen muttered, sticking his gloved fingers into the methodical slashes across the abdomen. "They're too good. Too purposeful."

Ianto stood and watched Owen poke around in the cavity for a second before glancing at the crowd. Ianto was always thinking of crowd control—it was one of the reasons that Jack liked to have him along. Tosh and Owen were often too engrossed in the task at hand, Gwen was often preoccupied by motives and process, but Ianto, Ianto wanted to preserve the _image_ , the dark mysterious nature of Torchwood, their clandestine acts. Jack was happy to let him manage this angle—Ianto was best utilised when he was controlling, or rather, directing things from behind the scenes. Jack figured that he'd make a good Torchwood director someday, if Torchwood ever decided to expand again, or maybe he could just understudy Jack. Jack liked to be understudied, with an emphasis on the under part.

But right now, Ianto wanted them gone from the scene, everything wrapped up, and he couldn't blame him. They were losing darkness, and even though the day was overcast, the natural light in the sky illuminated the scene too well. They still needed to move the body. Tosh and Gwen were on their way with the hoses to take care of the mess.

"I think you might want to wait on the autopsy until we're back at the Hub," Jack said nonchalantly, eyeing some coppers who were edging closer to the scene. One of them had a cell phone palmed in his left hand, trying to take a picture of the Xarxian. Jack smirked. Like they didn't scramble those first thing.

"This was deliberate. Considering that, it seems to me," Owen said, standing and stretching his gory hands over his head. Something blue dripped behind him from his fingers. "That we have a new player in our little drama, here."

Ianto looked on dispassionately. Jack sighed and stared at the body, wondering if he could will it to tell him something useful. Anything. Those cuts were specific; they had to tell him something. The worst part was that they _were_ familiar.

There were a lot of things that Jack had a passionate dislike for—nuts in brownies, for example. But this, this inability to dredge information, critical information, from his brain was one of the bigger ones. It was infinitely frustrating to know that one knew something, but not be able to recall what it was.

He often tried not to think about it, because when he did, he saw the Doctor's face, heard his voice, and feared for the future.

The Xarxian's eyes stared at the wall next to them.

Ianto handed Owen the carafe of coffee and the stack of styro cups. "They already think I'm creepy," he told him. "It's the suit. They've seen too many films."

Owen shook the carafe and grabbed the cups in his other hand. "You know," Owen muttered. "Just once I'd like to set off a flash bulb and tell everyone that what they saw was swamp gas reflected off of Venus or something." He stalked off to the police barrier.

Ianto and Jack finished loading the body and closed the back of the SUV. Ianto dusted his gloved hands together in distaste. "That's a horrible smell, that is."

Jack watched his lips purse as he leant against the vehicle and regarded Jack with a critical eye. "That look is never good, Ianto," he said cheerfully, examining the crowd for abnormalities as a convenient way to avoid looking Ianto in the eye. "If you have something to say, you should feel free."

"If," Ianto began, and then paused, as if he was searching for the words, "if something is going to be looking for these creatures, then maybe the dogs and Simran would be safer at Flat Holm—"

Jack quirked an eyebrow. "Who told you about Flat Holm?"

Ianto sighed and worked his hands in his coroner gloves. "Your private accounts didn't do themselves while you were away, Jack."

"Ah." Jack sighed; it was probably just a matter of time, anyway, before someone found out. Still. "Does anyone else know?"

Ianto looked out over the crime scene, now pretty much a bunch of gawkers and police and empty bloody spaces. "No. That's not my decision." He stared hard at Jack. "But you should tell them anyway."

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets before he remembered that Gwen's fucking jeans were painted on her legs. He settled with his jacket pockets. It was unsatisfying, as far as gestures went. "No."

"Fine."

Sometimes Jack wondered when Ianto would argue with him for real, and not in the face of disaster or petty arguments like when he'd dropped his toothbrush in the toilet. Part of him wanted Ianto to argue with him the way Gwen argued with him. On second thought, no, he didn’t think he could take that much debate.

Oh yeah, he totally could.

"Anything else?" he asked, waiting for Ianto to press the issue.

He didn't. "Nope."

"Good then, because I was afraid you were going to ask me what Gwen and I did last night after you all left. I took polaroids."

Ianto's face reddened. "Not. Not that that wasn't on my mind, but I—"

"I'm messing with you," Jack said, but decided not to elaborate on what they'd done last night, because he hadn't been sober for most of it, and his skull was repaying him for that indiscretion today. He might have actually taken polaroids; he made a note to ask Gwen later. It wasn't often that he drank, and he had seriously misjudged Gwen's alcohol tolerance. That she hadn't seen fit to correct him after the third drink was suspicious.

Ianto peeled off his rubber gloves and tossed them into the bin that the police had set up for waste disposal. Owen breezed past them with a thumbs up sign and dove into the backseat of the SUV. "You two better get the hell in here. This car is already getting ripe." To punctuate the urgency to leave, the beginnings of the rainstorm hit Jack's face.

Ianto shrugged his shoulders. "Well, Gwen is fit, as you are fully aware. And if you wanted to," Ianto said, or more appropriately _didn't_ say the important words in the sentence, and Jack thought that rather charming. Maybe it was because they were in semi-public. The other man rounded the SUV to the driver's seat. "I wouldn't stop you. How often does one get the chance?"

Jack put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, watching the door shut. "Huh."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh thought the dogs were unnerving. There were eight of them, but they sat about the flat mutely, sedately, as if they knew exactly what was going on, could understand every word. She made eye contact with a Bull Mastiff, who blinked first and then turned his head away, gazing forlornly at the sliding glass doors of the balcony.

The flat was rather posh, but empty and bright. Simran and the dogs fit nicely in the three-bedroom space, and now that they had settled her in with a few necessities and luxuries that Gwen and Tosh thought she shouldn't have to do without, it was a livable space.

Simran sipped from her mug of tea and curled her legs under her; it was, Tosh thought, a remnant gesture of the woman trapped inside the body, not the body that housed her. She spared at glance at Gwen. Did Gwen feel trapped? Granted, she and Jack hadn't had to cope with nearly the confusion of the poor woman in front of them, and they were familiar enough with the concept of 'oh, this is a wacky situation' (Once they'd all been gassed by a giant flower and woken up naked in the Hub pool. To this day they never spoke of it, not even Jack.).

She shifted her purse in her lap and wondered why she didn't just set it down. Then she remembered that her equipment was in there, and all of it was shiny. Tosh glanced at the dogs and decided that she didn't want to have to explain to Jack or the others why she'd had to chase her Plotznak frequency scrambler down the throat of a Doberman, an explanation that would result in mockery whilst sitting on a table at the A&E.

Gwen leaned in towards Simran from her perch on the overstuffed chair. "How are you getting on, then?"

Simran closed her eyes. "I'm taking all of this rather well," she muttered, almost smiling.

Gwen set down the Yorkie she'd been holding with a pat. "Yeah, that'd be the Xanax."

"It's cracker."

The dog (Xog? Tosh agreed with Ianto that the name was uncomfortably disrespectful, but she didn't know how else to think of it, really) wandered away to lie down under the eating table in the kitchenette.

Tosh liked this flat. She wondered if they had any other lodgings available. She could probably afford a place like this. Well, now that she was full salary. The previous four years had been comfortable, financially, but not _this_ comfortable. Several months ago her paycheque had doubled and her inquiries as to its cause had been met by Jack with a wink and a shrug about government oversight and wretchedness. That it had been shortly after his return hadn't escaped Tosh's notice.

The three of them talked about the flat and the dogs and their frightening silence. Simran set down her mug of tea. "I took them for a walk this morning," she said, "Just around the garden. They were all very politic. I didn't want to use leashes on them, because, well." She shrugged.

Gwen nodded and scratched the ears of a Jack Russell. "They're a very intelligent race," she said softly, and Tosh idly wondered if the Xarxians felt trapped, too. That seemed to be the theme of this visit in Tosh's mind. She thought that it might be fun to be in a man's body for a while, but now just the concept of it was making her feel claustrophobic.

"Have you seen, well, me?" Simran asked. "I haven't heard anything since the other man, the doctor, came by yesterday with the dogs." She glanced about. "Can I call them that? Should I?"

Gwen flipped the Jack Russell's ears a little in her hand, and it leaned into her fingers. Alien or not, the Xarxians liked to be touched. Tosh made a mental note to ask Jack about it later. "I think you can call them that for now," Gwen told Simran. "And yeah, we saw her on the way here. Him," she amended quickly. She turned her hand over and studied the back of it closely before scratching it with her other hand.

Tosh sipped from her mug and sat back. "Your body is out of observation, and we're planning on bringing Dylan to stay here with you until Saturday, if that is all right with you. He's doing a little better about the whole thing, now that he's been spoken with." What she meant was that Gwen had gone into the room and had a heart to heart with him, and when she had emerged, he had stopped trying to yank his IVs out and curse at everyone who entered the room. Tosh didn't know what Gwen had said, but she had noticed that since Gwen had started at Torchwood, her communication skills, already rather formidable, had gone up at least ten new skill levels.

Simran sighed and ran a hand through her hair, then stared at her hand, too. "I guess that's for the best," she said glumly. "He's not going to, you know, _do_ anything again, is he?

Tosh shook her head. "He understands that this is temporary, that you'll be here with him, and that you will knock him out at the slightest sign of destructive behaviour." She nodded firmly, to make her point, and Gwen mirrored her.

Simran looked relieved. Or at least, the body looked relieved. Tosh was trying not to decipher body language too much from anyone these days, even those people still in their bodies; if this had taught her one thing, it was that people's body language was often not as easy to read as she had previously thought. That little shrug Gwen gave, was it assent? Resignation? Frustration? Too difficult to tell.

There was the noise of splashing water, and Tosh understood immediately that something was drinking from the toilet. They all glanced at the loo when the drinking stopped, and there was a clicking of nails on the tile. One of the dogs, a large Rottweiler with a bullhead, sauntered into the room, stared at the three of them for a long moment, sniffing the air, and then walked over to one of the bare sunspots on the rug. It circled once and then flopped down on its side and promptly went to sleep.

Tosh smiled. Sometimes she wanted to be a dog instead.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen was elbow-deep in Xarxian guts when Jack found Gwen again. She was standing at the top rail of the theatre, ribbing Owen casually about his bedside manner.

"You know I'm only taking your shite because I keep thinking you're Jack," Owen warned. "One more quip and this scalpel is aimed straight for your heart." He flipped the scalpel in one gloved hand, and just the action of his movements sent Xarxian ichor all over the place. Jack tried to breathe through his nose; the whole place smelled like some sort of abattoir. It was pointless to ask if it bothered Owen, because he had probably smelled worse, Jack was sure. Hell, Jack had smelled worse, but it had been a while, and he was usually in a body that he had learnt to control better than this one.

Hrm, back to the matter at hand. Jack wracked his brain for memories of last night as he sidled over to Gwen and watched her laugh at Owen. She didn't seem to have any issues with the body, aside from the fact that it wasn't hers. Jack had noticed that he wasn't as adept at minute motor skills, but he had been able to sign a few things this morning in a passable version of his handwriting, enough that Ianto had given it the stamp of approval and packed the forms off to Whitehall in a slim red envelope. Jack had watched his waistcoat-clad back leave the room with a little bit of a sigh. It was a nice back. He would be glad when nineteen geelucks was over, so that he could see it again without clothing.

"But Owen, it's like watching an episode of CSI, you're so posh down there," Gwen snickered. "Take off your glasses and say something meant to be deep and ponderous."

Jack had to dodge the scalpel Owen tossed over his shoulder. " _Hey_!" he shouted. "We don't throw knives here unless we're in the circus, Mister Harper."

Owen turned then, making his 'oops' face, which Jack thought never looked especially apologetic, probably for a reason. "Oh, sorry, I was provoked." But he had already turned back to the body, spraying the cavity with the hose so that he could look more closely at it without all the blood in the way. He reached into the cavity, pulled out a fork, and pitched it into the sink with a grunt.

Jack leaned on the rail and they both watched Owen take apart the latest Xarxian. "So last night," he said, trying to sound nonchalant, but _not_ nonchalant. Chalant. Was that a word? He hooked his foot into the rail and cocked his head, studiously not looking at Gwen. "We uhm," he paused. "I don't think I remember much clearly after that third glass of scotch."

Gwen smiled, and he was struck by just how straight his teeth were. Huh. "Are you asking if we had sex?" she asked him, her voice low. "I'm crushed."

Now she was starting to sound a little too much like him, and he wasn't sure if that was sexy or not. Or even flattering. Did he sound like that? "Uh, should I be asking?"

Gwen stared at him for a long moment, and he realised that he had no idea what she was thinking. If they had been reversed, well, reversed-reversed (non-reversed?), he not only would have been able to tell what she was thinking, but he could probably tell her what she was about to say and craft a reply to deliver before she'd even finished constructing a sentence. Now, it was like looking into a mirror while drunk—it was his face, but he had no control over the expressions.

"No," she said finally. "You were quite eager, but you backed off when I said no," she told him. Jack narrowed his eyes; his own eyes were really really blue. He always knew that, but it was strange to see them and not be able to interpret them. Jack knew he'd be distracted by that for a while, the face that wasn't his.

He forced himself to look away and down at the theatre. "Oh, well then, good. I would hate to have offended your honour or something," he mumbled. To be honest, he wasn't as disappointed as he might have been. Gwen was a big girl (or a big boy, depending on how you looked at it), and could have defended herself, even in her own body, really. And secondly, Jack liked to think that if he ever did get to have sex with Gwen (and it would only be once, he was sure), he would remember it.

He would like to remember it in his own body, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Tosh grunted from her workstation, and they turned to look at her when she took off her glasses and rubbed her temples. "This sodding rain is giving me a headache," she said. "I can't see anything on CCTV, and all the possible sightings of the Xarxians are on here, but they're all blurry and they could be anything. Another human, another alien, a Furry…"

Jack crossed his arms and watched Ianto pass with the tray of coffees and mouth the word 'Furry?' before shaking his head. Jack certainly hoped there weren't furries out there; rain wasn't good for a fifty-pound polyester fox costume. "So yeah, no leads on that, right. Owen, any time today? You look like our only entertainment."

"Oh why the hell not," Owen groused, pulling off his gloves and tossing them in the bin. "This is as good as it's going to get anyway. Do I still have to fill out the paperwork if you all sit in on the post mortem?"

Ianto descended the stairs, sidestepped a puddle of viscera and blood, and handed Owen a coffee. "Yes," he told him before pivoting and returning the way he'd come.

Owen sighed. "Figures. Bugger that for a game of--oh thanks." He took the packet of crisps Ianto threw at him with sigh and ripped the bag open before crossing to the camera display and punching a few buttons to show the screen. "Right then," Owen said as he magnified the camera view and projected it on the wall. "Gather round. Uncle Owen's story time is about to begin."

Ianto handed Gwen a coffee. "That is possibly one of the more disturbing scenarios I've had to consider all week," he told Gwen, smirking conspiratorially before schooling his face into one of placidity. Jack could tell just by looking at him that for a split second Ianto had forgotten that Jack wasn't in there. He faked it pretty well, though. Gwen probably didn't even notice "Uncle Owen reads the classics of Dear Penthouse."

Owen smiled. "You can't take them from the bags," he told Ianto, "or you ruin the mint condition."

Jack threw a pen cap at Owen and sighed. "The job you do to pay for those skin rags? Please do it."

"Riiiight then," Owen said, pointing the camera at the abdomen. "What you see here are the cuts that were made before I started my examination." The screen flickered and flipped images, and Jack was confronted with the feeling that he recognised the wounds again. The gashes across the stomach were wide and parallel, with one line directly down the center of the chest, like a double crossed plus sign. It had to mean something. Cutting that second line would have been difficult; the murderer would have had to hold the skin and muscle down so that it didn't snag. Or maybe the knife was just that sharp.

Gwen sipped her coffee. "Ritual killings?"

"Could be." Owen shrugged. "Not easy cuts to make, and these things are hard to bring down if they don’t want to be brought, am I right, Jack?" Owen glanced at them both, and it was hard to say if he had been confused or if he had actually been deferring to Gwen. Gwen, even Owen would grudgingly admit, had the training for police style investigations.

Jack squinted at the screen. Maybe if he looked at it a lot through different foci, it would jog his memory. Instead, it just looked blurry. So much for that idea. Jack wondered if memories like that weren't stored physically in his actual brain, and since he wasn't in that body, he couldn't access them, not unlike being on the wrong computer. He glanced at Gwen, who was blinking at the images as if she could divine their secrets just staring hard enough. Nah, this couldn't work like that. He remembered all kinds of useless things right now: a Blanda9 had three extra toes on the right hand; the fifth rule of the Time Agency was made to be broken, it was in the rulebook; John's favorite mushroom was the chanterelle. No, he remembered plenty of unhelpful things.

He realised that they were all staring at him and he didn't remember why. "Huwhut? Yeah," he mumbled, shaking his head. Gwen's hair whispered around his face. He wanted to pull it back. It felt too heavy, in his face all the time. He set his boot heel on the chains. Gwen sat down and let her legs dangle over the edge. Tosh raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything.

There was a click of keys as Owen advanced the images. "And now that I opened her up—I think it's a she—it seems as if whoever made these cuts was obviously trying to make a statement." He rolled his eyes, and Jack knew exactly what Owen thought of people who said it with murder, not flowers. "Aside from that, though, they knew exactly what they were looking for." He pulled a flap of skin back and pointed into the remains, all shoved and jacked open with a spring loaded brace and forceps like some sort of excavation site. "The storage pouch is gone. Cut out, pretty expertly too."

"The storage pouch, like where we got the…Gender Bender," Tosh said softly. "Why would they cut it out?"

"I've been thinking about that, and I wager that it's a delicacy on some foreign planet. They sauté it up and serve with a lemon volute and wilted leeks—"

"Or they could have wanted something _inside_ the pouch," Gwen said.

Owen gave her the death glare. Jack loved Owen's death glare, because he was so short and menacing, like a scrapper. Jack and Owen had tousled a few times, actually, and Owen was really good with his fists and feet. Jack had given him the address of a good Krav Maga school, and apparently he had taken advantage of it sometime, because the last time he'd seen Owen in action, he'd used an elbow-headbutt combination that should have put his assailant in hospital. Too bad it had been an alien species with no head and no pain receptors.

"Yeah, okay, that was what I had assumed," Owen said. "But they say that assumption makes an arse out of you and umption. So I thought I'd entertain all options."

Ianto sipped from his coffee and leaned on the railing next to Jack. "Who says that?" he mumbled.

Owen either ignored Ianto or he didn't care, because he pressed a few buttons and the pictures of the cavity changed to close-ups of tissue. "The pouch was severed right below the flap that's there to keep the…swallowed objects in. It's a one-way pouch, so I can only imagine that Xarxians somehow manage to bring their find back up the way it went down, so to speak." He reached back into the cavity with one gloved hand and dug into the crisps bag with the other. Jack wanted him to get his hands confused and eat from the wrong one, just for kicks. That'd be a laugh. A gross laugh.

"Okay, then," Gwen murmured, but it was loud enough for everyone to hear her. "Something in a storage pouch. Who else knows about the Xarxians?" There was dead silence.

Owen flipped off the images on the wall and tipped his crisp bag up to spill the crumbs into his mouth. "The police do now, or they did, before Ianto made them a cuppa" he said. "And our local vet and her psychotic bodyswapping mate, who is still in lockdown."

Jack cracked Gwen's knuckles and she glared at him for a second. "Neither of those are helpful, unless we think that Simran stole out of the safehouse in the middle of the night, happened to track this thing down and then eviscerate it with whatever she had handy in the kitchen—"

"And on a healthy dose of Xanax," Tosh added.

"And I wouldn't say eviscerate," Owen said, tossing the crisp bag away in the bin under Ianto's watchful (re: stalker) eye. "More like dissect. Possibly field dress."

Ianto sighed. "And we're back to your wilted leek theory."

Jack shrugged. "It isn't out of the realm of possibility," he said to the room, not wanting to give Owen too much credit. Sometimes when Owen got a theory, he latched onto it, and that was all fine and good, but it gave him tunnel vision. "But we should consider all possibilities. Like the possibility that something else came through the Rift after them." Even as he said it, his eyes travelled back down to the creature and he knew he'd hit the answer. It was in his gut, sitting there like the overly greasy bacon butty he'd eaten that morning (Tosh was a horrible enabler.). He thought about telling them all, but a hunch was a terrible thing to go on, and he wanted to look in the Archives for a little while before he decided that his hunch was more than indigestion.

Oh hell, the moment he said 'I'm going to do some poking about the Archives,' Ianto would know that something was up. Still.

Tosh started when her computer alarm went off, a soft tinkling of electronic chimes that sounded vaguely Asian. She swiveled in her chair, hands fluttering in surprise, little birds that settled on her keyboard and moved at lightning speed. "Oh!" Look at that!" When she looked back at him, her face was painted with smug accomplishment. "We have one!"

Finally, something was going right. They could bring in a Xarxian, live. In fact, now that they knew what was wrong with them, even if it were as ill-tempered as the first three had been, he was fairly sure that they would be able to take care of it without neutralising it.

"Tall, hideous slobbering grumpy alien sighted in Splott," Tosh said, "The exact words of the 999 call were, 'Oh god it's glowing and it has teeth, oh god help me oh god it's coming right for us'." She finished the transcript deadpan and blinked, sitting back in her chair. "That sound like us?"

Jack nodded. "Yeah, that's us." He was about to race to his office to get his coat when he remembered that he wasn't going to be doing a kid-dress-up impression. The idea of Gwen's body wearing the coat was ridiculous.

The idea of Gwen wearing nothing _but_ the coat had lots of merit. Warranted consideration, maybe.

He stuffed his arms in her leather jacket instead and palmed the keys in the pocket. "Ladies? Care to go out for a jaunt?" He raised his hands in questioning, pointing at the door. "Just us girls?"

Tosh smiled and scrambled for her jacket, but Gwen's grin was widest of all.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen found Ianto in one of the lower levels, away from the cells where they'd put up the Xarxians. He'd come down to offer them a bit of kibble, actually, since he figured, hey, they're dogs, albeit in large, potentially deadly bodies. Owen liked dogs. Never had one –was never allowed—but he had always liked to visit his friends who had dogs. There was something simple about a furry beast that would chase a stick about for you.

Owen decided that if he ever had a dog, he'd walk it in the park as much as possible, and then teach it to get beer from the fridge for him.

Ianto had taken the Xarxians out of their cells and led them to a huge underground room whose original purpose was…come to think of it, what the hell was this for? It was a concrete room much like a gymnasium, with high ceilings and cement floors, but pretty much nothing else. The two Xarxians were crouched on all fours, sometimes they stood up experimentally, but they seemed to prefer all fours, or at least a hunched-over lope.

Owen stood next to Ianto, who watched the aliens explore the room hesitantly, their big heads lowered as they tried to sniff the ground.

"I've been going through the list that we took from the shelter," Ianto said, glancing up from the paper on his clipboard. "I think I've their names straight. Observe."

Owen stood back and watched Ianto whistle. The two Xarxians turned, their eyes alight with anticipation, and Ianto held up a celery stick. "June! Come here, June!"

One of the Xarxians started forward, lumbering, loping steps, and if Owen hadn't known that they had consciousness in them that quite enjoyed a bowl of Bil-Jac, he might have been worried. Instead, 'June' clambered on all fours, not at all looking like something that one should have been comfortable seeing coming at them, and took the celery stick from Ianto's hand, pulling it into its maw with a practised tongue and chewing, unmistakably making a face.

Ianto smoothed his fingers along June's ear and sighed. "I know, celery, but you have to respect the body, love. I dipped it in beef flavouring."

Owen glanced back at the other one. "That's cool. Let me try." He pulled a celery stalk from Ianto's Tupperware box and waved it about. "Hey—what's its name?"

Ianto's mouth twitched. "Piddles."

Owen shook his head. "Oh you, you are a funny one." He waved the celery. "Oi! Piddles!"

They amused themselves for the next fifteen minutes, running the two creatures though a few paces around the underground area, throwing celery sticks for them to fetch. Owen had felt a little sorry about the whole thing; it seemed undignified, but then he figured that if he was transplanted into a dog, and what kept his human form happy during the whole thing was fetching celery and licking his privates, well then, he'd just have to live with the indignity, as long as he didn't have to watch it.

"Truth, though," he said finally, wiping his hands with a wet towel; they smelled like bullion. "What kind of a name is Piddles? Oh. _Oh._ "

Ianto pursed his lips and cocked his head. "I'm quite glad I have a hose down here."

Suddenly, Owen realised one of the reasons he didn't actually want to have a dog.

"What's that, then?" Owen said, pointing to the leather-looking wrist strap on Piddles's left arm. It looked a little like Jack's wrist strap.

Ianto tucked his clipboard under his arm and reached down to touch the strap. Piddles lifted her hand automatically as if to shake his. Owen's mouth quirked. He would not smile at the cuteness. Not with Jones around. "It looks like one of those universal translators we got in a few years ago. But all of ours were broken."

Owen crouched down next to him. "Like, as in it translates what they're saying?"

Ianto shrugged. "That would be my best guess." He lifted the flap curiously and they examined the blinking lights of the interface. "It looks as if it's in working order." He glanced at Owen. "Fancy a guess about what dogs are trying to say?"

Owen sat back on his haunches and watched Ianto press the button. There was a beep, and then the hiss of static. But nothing. Disappointing. Ianto frowned.

"Wait a tick," Owen said, rolling forward on the balls of his feet. He opened Ianto's Tupperware container, fished out a stick of beefy celery and had to hold it out of reach, which wasn't easy, since Piddles had the height and girth of a rugby flanker. "Piddles, speak."

Piddles was quite eager to please, and let out a succession of growls and gruff horking noises that probably came as close to what it could do with an extra voice box or three, but that really didn't matter, because the wrist strap flared to life, and he an Ianto were inundated with, _HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYLICKLICK HUNGRYNUMNUMNUMHUNGRYLICKLICKNUMNUMNUMNUMNUM_ before Owen thrust the celery in its mouth and Ianto grabbed the translator, jabbing the buttons haphazardly until he deactivated it. Piddles, startled by the noise, jerked her paw/arm away and bolted to the other side of the room, celery hanging from her mouth. Ianto toppled over and landed on his arse.

They stared at each other. "Well," Owen said. "Pretty much what we've always known, then."

Ianto's eyes were wide. "Yeah. Pretty much."

They were on their way back up to the upper levels when Ianto's comm beeped in his pocket and he pulled it out, fitting it into his ear. "Yes?" There was a shouting voice that Owen couldn't make out, but Ianto nodded and glanced at him, curling a finger in a beckoning gesture. He led the way to the cell area, talking into the headset to who Owen had realised was Tosh. "Right, hold him, it, the thing. We'll be right there, and –"

There was a very audible shout through the comm, and Ianto broke out in a dead run, Owen hotly on his heels.

They found Tosh trapped by a Xarxian, her small body tucked in a corner, her stun gun brandished, but unable to get a good shot. Ianto barreled into it, and knocked it off balance, and Owen moved in front of her to make sure that she was out of the way of the Xarxian's long arms and claws. She was shaking, but if Owen had to guess it was from rage. Tosh wasn't a shrinking flower, he had to give her that. She dove past him for the alien and zapped it in the back as it wrestled with Ianto, who had one of its arms in a grip. The alien shrugged off the stun voltage, and it yelped a little, jerking back towards the open cell door. Owen tugged on the Xarxian's other arm, and between the three of them they inched it towards the door. Ianto rapped it on the back of the head with his clipboard and they made minutely more progress.

It was no wonder then that Gwen and Jack had had to put down the other three, if they had been as bad as this one. Compared to June and Piddles (Jesus, _Piddles_.), it was a monster.

"Where are Jack and Gwen?" Owen grunted. This fucker was heavy. And thrashing. He and Ianto pulled at the upper arms and Tosh pushed from behind.

Tosh didn't answer right away, too busy avoiding the claws that swiped backwards; Owen adjusted his grip on his arm so that it wouldn't catch Tosh across the gut. "Faking a call to the constabulary." She pushed harder and the Xarxian-dog broke free of Ianto's grip and used its free hand to brace against the door, not unlike a cat trying to avoid the carrier.

"Oh bugger this," Ianto murmured, and lined up behind the thing, hunching and ducking his head and then body slamming the Xarxian squarely in the back. They both fell into the cell, but Ianto bounced out again, on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter.

"Does it answer to anything?" Owen asked as Tosh slammed the cell shut. The door banged with the weight of the alien. Tosh's hand was red with angry scratches and she was probably going to need stitches and antibiotics for her leg.

"Yes," she said dully. "Complete bastard."

Ianto checked the clipboard. "That's not on here. We should call him Oscar."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"You know what I hate?"

"I'm going to assume it's still not a mystery," Ianto said over the comm. He and Owen were in the middle of Bute Park, somewhat chattering into comms, somewhat sweeping the area with scanners and Mag-lites. It was rather a wasted effort, since they couldn't see anything even with the lights; it was pouring down rain.

"Oh ha ha," Jack grumbled. "No, these stupid elastic bands. "Gwen, Your hair is in my face, and I can't do this for shit—"

"Just let me—"

"Ow!"

"Sorry."

None of them were particularly happy to be there, and the rain, which had been coming down all day since sunrise, actually, had slowed everything down. The Xarxian dog was likely to hole up somewhere drier in the face of such weather, and so there hadn't been many sightings of it. Despite that, Jack and Gwen had agreed that they should look one last time, based on a short squawk on the police band about a shiny bright creature in Bute Park. Ianto could feel his shoes sinking into the mud as he walked, and he knew that the others would make fun of him forgetting wellies. Not that they had wellies, either, just that they would expect him to have thought of it.

There was one Xarxian out there on the loose, only one, and it was proving to be elusive. Like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. Ianto was fairly sure that even if the poor thing were out in this weather, they would never ever find it, because Cardiff wasn't the largest city, but she was pretty big, and the thing could be anywhere.

It was probably halfway to Caerphilly by now. Or stuck in the skip behind Positano's. Ianto shivered. It was hard to focus when one was wet, cold and hungry. He was starting to understand why wet cats on the windowsill looked so amazingly pathetic.

Beside him, Owen whistled ineffectively. "Here boy. Here you go. Ianto has a nice stalk of shitty celery for you."

Ianto sighed. If he had celery, he'd be eating it. He knew that Tosh was holed up in front of the monitors of the Hub, warm, dry, and probably working her way through a carton of leftover Chinese. He vaguely remembered the days when he was the one always left at the Hub. Jack and Gwen, he could tell from listening to their grumbling over the comm, weren't faring any better out in Cooper's Field. Jack had apparently discovered that his shoes weren't made for trudging through Welsh mud and Gwen had, before they hit the expanse of green, clocked herself in the head a few times with very low tree branches.

After they had secured Oscar in the cells and shoved some food into its (his) compartment, Ianto and Owen had "put away" Piddles and June for the evening, and Owen had stitched Tosh up and declared that she should probably have the rabies series (it didn't really occur here, but who knew what Xarxians had?), hence her current location. Ianto considered that going through the rabies series was probably a small price to pay for not having to go out in Cardiff monsoon season. On the other hand, they were abdominal shots, and that was never fun. He figured that it said a great deal about how unhappy he currently was that he would rather be in physical pain than in Bute Park at this exact moment.

Jack had been mum about the whole dead alien thing, though he had said something about looking around the Archives, which usually meant that he was hiding something. In such circumstances, Ianto considered as he tried to ignore the fact that water had just seeped underneath the join of his toes to his foot (possibly the worst place to feel water whilst wearing a shoe), he usually let Jack go down and make a mess of things, and then in the clean up process followed Jack's haphazard research trail in a manner that revealed everything Jack was looking for and found. It was how he learnt most things before the rest of the team. Well, that and he actually read the things in the Archives, which was more than he could say for the rest of his colleagues.

That was fine with him. It was his lot in life: coffee and reading. And occasionally stun-gunning things in the head, which he was also not a little disturbed to find didn't bother him.

Tosh sighed into the comm. "I take it you haven't seen anything?"

Owen kicked a rock and it pinged off a tree trunk and into a giant puddle off to the side. "Nothing but a lot of mud."

"Sweet Jesus," Gwen grumbled, "we're never going to find it. It's late and dark, and who would be out in this weather? Aside from us."

Ianto had to agree. This was futile, and his suit was soaked, and Owen was inching towards the park fence, as if he was going to bolt any second for home. Ianto's mind flashed on a picture of a scabby-kneed eight-year-old Owen, running full tilt down a grubby street, and the image was too familiar. He didn't want to sympathise with Owen too much, especially over cooked-up possible memories.

"Yeah," Jack said over the comm, and Ianto could tell that he was frustrated. Frustrated Jack was always difficult to deal with. "This blows. Let's pick it up tomorrow."

Ianto rolled his eyes and wiggled his toes in his soaked shoes. Finally.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen and Tosh had streaked out around nine-thirty, Owen looking like a drowned rat and Tosh looking a little green around the gills. Ianto was sifting through some paperwork on his workstation, a towel wrapped around his shoulders, and Jack was nowhere in sight. Gwen finished buttoning the blue shirt (from a seemingly endless array of blue shirts, each one folded professionally and wrapped in plastic), and worked the braces up her shoulders, even though the belt was already in place.

Ianto heard her footsteps and glanced up, smiling before he could help himself. She smiled back and waved a little, and something in _that_ made him redden and look away.

Poor Ianto. She wondered if this was how Jack would feel around Rhys, or how Rhys would feel around Jack. Probably, in a way. Her hands ran down the rails as she thunked down the stairs from her office and to his workstation.

"Food arrived whilst you were downstairs," Ianto said, waving a bag. "The rest is in the conference room. samosa?"

Gwen realised that she hadn't eaten since lunchtime, an oversight that surprised her. Jack's body wasn't really hungry, actually, hadn't ever really expressed hunger in the way that her body would be if she hadn't eaten in eight hours. She dug her hand in the bag and fished out a hand-sized pocket, the dough still warm to her touch. Ianto bit into one, set it on a serviette, and wiped the tips of his fingers on the edge before picking up his pencil again and jotting more notes on the papers spread out in front of him.

"What are you working on?" Investigative nibbles revealed that the inside of her pastry was filled with potatoes and peas.

Ianto glanced at her, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. "Small side project. And a new side project," he added hastily, pulling yet more sheets of paper over the ones he'd been jotting on. "Plans to house the Xarxian dogs, should the body transfer not actually, uhm, work." He sighed. "Just in case. We can't adopt them out, like they're normal dogs."

Gwen perched on the stool opposite Ianto and set both her hands on the tabletop. "Yeah, I would imagine." She stared at him, then, wondering where Jack was.

"He's changing and getting some of your things together," Ianto answered, and then, sotto voce, he leant towards her and commented, "If it's all right with you, I'll take him to mine. To sleep." Ianto nodded at the sofa. "That thing is horribly uncomfortable." There must have been something in her eyes that gave him pause, because he stuttered. "To sleep, Gwen." His eyes sought out Jack's office, the light on and the only illumination at that level of the Hub. "He deserves a chance to actually sleep."

Gwen hadn't thought about that angle, actually, she considered as she bit her way around the samosa.

Ianto watched her mouth for a second before shaking himself minutely. "Are you? Sleeping at all, I mean."

Gwen shrugged. "Sort of. I passed out last night, but before that, not so much." She sighed, and set the samosa down, wiping her hands on her trousers. "He was right when he said he doesn't sleep. It's like…drifting. Like falling asleep in front of the telly."

Ianto bit his lower lip. Something was obviously playing about in his head, and she was pretty sure that she knew what it was. "What's it…what's it like? Being Jack?"

Right. Gwen smiled then. "I'm not really Jack, you know. Or maybe I am." She frowned. She was right back where she started. "What makes me Gwen? What makes him Jack?"

Ianto shrugged. "Poor phrasing, then. I'm sorry."

Hand waving on both their parts, a form of 'sorry, sorry'. Gwen listened to the ticking of the clock, the hum of Tosh's equipment, the tinkle of water on water on water in the Hub Tub. She wondered if she was hearing differently. She wished that she could record it the way she heard it now and then compare it once she was in her own body, but the filter of Jack's ear would be gone, and she wouldn't have a frame of reference anymore.

"You know, if you really want to know, I bet we could get the two of you in a room with that box after all of this is over—"

"Oh god no," Ianto said hastily. "Well…" His eyes off-centred when he stared at one of the screensavers at Owen's nearby station, scrolling text that read something about official Torchwood policy. Gwen was fairly sure that Owen would have never put that up, so she guessed that Ianto had hacked it. Again.

Ianto shuddered. Wherever his daydream had gone, it had not been to sexy happy times. In his defense, hers hadn't gone there either, much to Jack's dismay, she was sure.

"My ears were burning, and I thought I'd hurt myself," Jack called, pounding down the steps, small bag in his hand. "And then I realised that someone was talking about me."

Gwen drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "Has that line ever not been cheesy?" she asked. Ianto stabbed at his papers with his pencil, obviously trying to reinvest himself in the job at hand. The tips of his ears were red, and she wondered what he had been imagining. Maybe it hadn't been sexy, but it had been _something_.

She didn't want to think about the other thing, the other Jack thing, because she didn't have any information about that and she didn't want to ever have any.

Jack tossed the bag on the floor and kicked it under the table and out of the way. He leaned on the table perpendicular to them both, is arms crossed and elbows holding his weight. "When something works, you should stick with it."

Ianto set the pencil down and groped for a pen. "Yes, because that's working for you."

Jack glanced down at the papers on the table, obviously nonplussed. "What's going on here?"

"Housing plans for the Xogs—" she stopped when Ianto glared at her. "The Xarxian dogs," she amended. "And I'm still worried about our find from this morning."

Jack slid some of the photos from the morning's autopsy out of the folder and stared at them, brows knitted. His eyes travelled the lines of the cuts, and his jaw ground.

"You have to fess up now," Gwen said, ruffling Jack's sodden hair. He narrowed his eyes at her but didn't say anything. "What do you know about those cuts?"

Jack flipped the photo over and stared at the Xarxian's chest. "I know I've seen them before, and not on this planet. And I know that whatever made them did it on purpose." He stared at her then, his eyes going from her face to the samosa in her hand then to her face and then to the samosa. "There have been so many bodies, you see, I just—are there any mo—"

Ianto lifted the bag and waved it about without looking up from his list, and Jack dug into it gratefully. Gwen rolled her eyes. By the end of this week she'd be lucky if Jack didn't put a half-stone on her. On the other hand, she's probably just run it off in the following month. And those samosas were rather good. Trust Tosh and her fried food detector to have found them.

"Like I was saying," Jack said around the half-samosa in his mouth. Ianto snorted softly; Gwen could see his shoulders bobbing with amused and probably resigned laughter. "I can't put my finger on it. But I will." Jack gestured with the samosa and a pea flew out of it, plinked off Ianto's plans and bounced down onto the floor, rolling into the Hub Tub.

Gwen raised her eyebrows.

Jack smiled. "You're a messy eater, Gwen."

She was about to answer, when Ianto straightened, shuffled his papers into a pile and swept them into a desk drawer. "Right. Make the rest of that take away."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

One of the things that Ianto had simply not thought of in this whole exchange was the fact that Jack didn't sleep. Now granted, Jack liked to say that he didn't sleep, and it was, for the most part, true—he had this sort of sleep thing, but it wasn't what Ianto would call restful, but it worked for him, and that was one of the main reasons that Jack never stayed over at Ianto's on the rare occasions they ended up there.

Now that Jack had been sleeping the last three nights, and sleeping well, sleeping the sleep of the hedonistic, one might have said, Ianto decided that it was only right and proper that he sleep in a real bed, and not one designed and handed out by the RAF fifty years prior. They'd said goodnight to Gwen, who was still prowling about the Hub much like her body's normal inhabitant, and set out for Ianto's, with, chastely and sincerely, sleep the only thing on their minds.

What Ianto hadn't counted on was that Jack (and he should have seen it coming) had nightmares. And if Jack was a talker for all activities that could take place in a bed, the REM cycle was no exception.

Jack thrashed in bed, and Ianto caught the arm before it hit him in the face. As he touched Jack, his current form came roaring awake, a litany of garbled nonsense on his lips.

"—with the wheat and she ate Squeaky Fromme!" His hair fell into his face as he all but hyperventilated, hands shaking and grasping in the air. Ianto sat up slowly, trying to ascertain if Jack was awake or in some sort of fugue state.

"Hey," he murmured, deciding that a hand on the back was pretty innocuous. He rubbed it over Jack's shoulder blades. That's what his mum used to do for him, and later, a few times after mum had gone, Rhiannon. "Hey, you were having a nightmare."

Jack flopped back onto the bed, trapping Ianto's hand. "Oh man, I must have eaten something bad." He glanced at Ianto. "What did we have for dinner?"

Ianto racked his brain, even though he knew this was Jack's way of not talking about the screaming and flailing. "Indian, I think."

"Does no one brown bag it anymore?" Jack grumbled, rubbing his face with his hand. Once again he'd forgotten to wash Gwen's make up off, and the eyeliner he'd painstakingly put on this morning in the car (Ianto had hit as many bumps as possible in retribution for being shut out of the Hub the night before) was smeared in the corners of his eyes like some Welsh-Egyptian statue. It was also all over Ianto's white pillowcase.

Jack flung the covers back, which was a feat since most of them were tangled about his legs. He stood and stretched, looking a little ridiculous in the sweatpants that he'd claimed once again, despite his bag full of Gwen clothes. He hadn't wanted to wear a shirt to bed, but Ianto had put his foot down and so there he was, in those pants that were too big and a skin tight undershirt of Gwen's that was too small, it seemed, a refugee from a nineties hip-hop dance video.

"What are you doing?" Ianto groused, sitting up and turning on the light. They both blinked, and Ianto wondered why squinting like this always made people look like they were angry. Was Jack angry? His lips moved and his eyes darted about the room.

He ran a hand through his hair and sighed in frustration when it snagged halfway through. "I'm going to sleep on the sofa." He sighed. "If I can sleep."

Ianto glanced pointedly at the queen size bed, one of the only luxuries he had bothered with after making full salary at Torchwood. "I thought you were doing well," he said carefully. "I can move to the sofa if you wa—"

"You should sleep in your own bed," Jack said firmly. "Really," he said waving a hand to cut off Ianto. "I know what you were trying to do, and it was nice. It was great, but, look, it doesn't matter where I sleep, and I don't want to get used to it anyway, because in a few days I'll be back at the Hub. Anyway," he finished, waving a hand dismissively and padding out into the hallway. "I'm fine."

Ianto ran his hands through his hair, flopped them in his lap. Stared at the moon coming in the window. He heard the fridge open and the unmistakable sound of the Brita pitcher hitting everything on the shelf as Jack clumsily extracted it. The padding of bare feet on the hardwood as he made his way to the television, flipped it on, and settled on something too low for Ianto to discern.

The decision was made then. Ianto tossed the covers back and touched his feet to the floor. He opened his sock drawer and dug around in the back, extracting what he wanted, and then stripped the blankets from the bed, dragging them into the living room.

Jack was curled in the corner of the sofa, cupping a glass of water in his hands, looking pathetic and sad and overwhelmingly not like himself or Gwen, not even when he turned those big soulful eyes on Ianto and frowned.

"I was saving this for a special occasion." Ianto tossed the Barbarella DVD at him. "I think this merits a special occasion," he said, trying to make his voice as dry as possible.

Jack glanced from him to the DVD and then back to Ianto when he flopped down on the other end of the sofa, billowed the blankets over himself, and flipped one end down and made a 'come on, then' gesture. "It's cold, Jack. Get a move on."

 

 **FRIDAY**

 _If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them._ (Jack Handey)

Jack flipped the buff folder shut and tossed it on an ever-growing pile of identical folders. He was making a right mess of Ianto's clever organising system, a system that Ianto had tried to explain once, but Jack hadn't listened. As far as he could see, Ianto's system consisted of 'alphabetical order'. He was fairly sure that if he said that, he'd find himself sleeping alone for weeks and weeks to come.

He slammed the drawer in front of him shut and cursed when he caught one of Gwen's freakishly long nails in the edge. Okay they weren't freakish, not like Nostrovite freakish, but they were longer than his normally were, and he'd already managed to draw blood on himself by scratching too hard, and now Gwen's body had some nice arse scratches. He _really_ hoped they healed somewhat before Monday, or he'd never hear the end of it. In private. She'd give him the moon-eyes. And she was really good at the moon-eyes.

There was something very bothersome about the Xarxian with the stomach cuts lying upstairs, and bothersome things were, Jack had learnt over the long years, not to be ignored. Much like strange rashes and that bizarre noise the car made when you cut the engine. Hence the little excavation down in the Archives, planned for a time when Ianto wouldn't _hover_. Ianto was doing the morning weevil cages, and then he'd be making coffee, and then he'd sort the post, and then he'd say, 'Where's Jack?' and it'd take at least another thirty minutes to find him, so Jack figured he had about another hour to toss files about and then clean them all up before—

"What are you doing?" His voice startled the shit out of him, and the massive and barely contained file labelled 'Raxicoricofallapatorius' flipped through his fingers and went up in the air like a deck of cards in the middle of a game of fifty-two pick up. His arm flailed and he slammed it on the metal cabinet to his left, scraping the length of it along the open drawer he'd neglected to close.

Gwen caught him before he stumbled further, mostly because his boot heel failed to get traction on the five-inch stack of files he was using as a stepstool and he fell backwards. He leant back against what he knew was Gwen, but at this moment smelled like he used to smell.

He paused for a second. He missed that smell. Gwen always smelt like strawberries, and he tried to honour that, but well, he missed English Leather.

Now wait, that was Ianto who smelt like English Leather. He missed it anyway, for obvious reasons.

"What are you doing down here" Gwen asked. "If Ianto sees this, you're mincemeat."

Jack pulled away and regained his balance, then stepped from the stack of files and pulled his top down, a gesture that people always seemed to do to cover up the fact that they were flustered. "Why do people always say that? Is it the mince part? Or the meat part? Why not, 'If Ianto sees this, you're fondue'? That would be just as bad."

Gwen shoved her hands in her pockets and leant back against a filing cabinet. "I don't think it matters what you say," she told him, her mouth smirking, "when he sees this you are unequivocally in the doghouse."

Jack grinned and shuffled a few files and stacked them neatly on top. Gwen had a point. The least he could do was stack all the files rather than leave them lying about on the floor. "Why do they say that? Is it something about dogs in general or—"

"You're stalling." Gwen bent down and picked up a wad of loose papers and arranged them so that they were all in the same direction. "Raxicoricofallapatorius? Do we have a Slitheen problem?"

Jack paused and thought about it. No, they didn't bother with ritual disembowelment. "No, I don't think so." He sighed. "I don't know what our problem is." He sighed again, and the pages in front of him ruffled.

Gwen set the stack of papers on top of the cabinet and regarded him with a critical eye. "Doesn't that hurt?" she asked, and Jack followed her eyes to his arm, where the stitches Gwen'd got on Monday night were open and slightly bleeding. Red dripped down the length of his arm down onto one of the papers still on the floor, a hand sketch of a Slitheen in its true form.

"Yeah," he admitted, because it suddenly did hurt, and he was aware that he'd done this himself, and more importantly, not to himself. Not really. He glanced at Gwen to see if she was upset, but she just looked concerned. Was that his concerned face? It looked a lot like his hungry face.

Gwen sighed. "Well, you should get that cleaned or stitched or at least get a plaster," she told him, her mouth drawn in a frown. He followed her up the stairs and to the first landing when she stopped and turned to look at him. "Is this something bad? I mean, of course it's bad," she reasoned aloud, eyes distant in thought. "But I mean, this is some sort of an alien threat to another alien, like a…territory war or something?"

Lord, he hadn't even _thought_ of that.

"I don't think so," he replied, starting up the stair and leaving her to follow. "But we should start planning ways to narrow this whole mess down. Is everyone here?"

"Ianto and Tosh went out to get the last Xarxian," Gwen said from behind him. "I have a nice arse."

Jack grinned over his shoulder. "Thanks. You work out." That earned him a swat, and he laughed, jogging up the last few stairs to the atrium.

Gwen barked a laugh herself, and they entered the atrium level of the Hub in general good spirits. Jack sauntered to the upper level of autopsy bay and held his arm out when Owen glanced up at them. "I require your medical technique, Mister Harper."

Owen rolled his eyes. "I already lost the bet that you'd be in here with an injury less than twenty-four hours after this whole thing started, so this doesn't help me much." He slammed the binder in his hand shut and set it on the table, waving his fingers. "Come on, then, let me impress you with my tender ministrations."

Jack watched him slip on a pair of gloves as he jaunted down the stairs, and it occurred to him that they had all thought he'd be more foolhardy than he actually was. Or maybe. "Really? You all think I'm that clumsy?"

There was the sound of clashing metal and crinkling plastic as Owen dug about in his drawers for gauze and antibiotics, a few loose steri strips and butterfly clips. Jack didn't want to tell him that he could do this himself, because his arm was rather throbbing, and when he held it out and Owen settled it on the table between them he looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. "Your boyfriend bet that you'd do this about three days ago. This is infected." He pressed on the wound where it was still stitched and yellow pus oozed out of the first open gap in the wound.

Gwen made a tsking noise. "What did I tell you on day one?"

Jack rolled his eyes. "I am not incapable of taking care of myself just because of that…other…thing," he said, trailing off because that was it exactly.

Owen doused Jack's arm with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at it with cotton wool. "See the thing is, Jack, you have a rather devil-may-care about your body sometimes." He binned the cotton and dried the arm with gauze. "I admit from a psychological and medical standpoint, I was interested to see how you would handle being in a body that was a hundred percent normal."

"Hey," Gwen said, leaning on the chain above them. "You make that sound bad, 'normal'."

Owen glanced up at her. "Oh you know what I mean. But if it makes you feel better, you have a lovely set of—"

Gwen dropped a paperback book from Tosh's workstation on his head.

"Oi! I was going to say eyes! Jesus!"

Gwen rounded the theatre to come down the steps, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall behind her. Jack studied her. It was him, slightly stropped. If he'd worn that face, it would have been for different reasons. Like. Uhm, if UNIT had pissed him off, or John had waltzed back in, or Mickey Smith had set something important on fire. Yeah, that's what that face was for.

"You weren't," Jack whispered, when Owen turned back towards him with an unpeeled steri strip in his hands.

Owen made cupping gestures in front of his chest, out of Gwen's eyesight and mouthed the word, 'knockers'. Ah. Owen: making Jack look like the preferable male specimen since forever, even when Jack currently resided in the body with the kno—er, breasts.

"In the interests of earning the paycheque that I use to buy my skin rags, as you put it yesterday," Owen said as he pressed the steri strip down on the arm. Jack was surprised at how little it hurt, actually. Owen pinched the skin and pulled and yet. He wondered if Owen had slipped him a mickey. "I took the liberty of checking our inventory from the dead bodies, and we don't have anything remotely interesting to anyone, unless you like cheap silverware," Owen said as he finished the bandage. "And the live, Xogs—" he whispered that, even though Ianto wasn't about to correct him. "Their storage pouches are empty. That leaves the one Tosh and Ianto are fetching hither," he paused, patting Jack's arm. Or something we already have."

Jack stared at the bandage. "Why am I not comforted?"

Owen glanced up from the sink, distracted. "Oh sorry," he muttered. "I failed the comfort section of med school."

Jack poked at his arm, and the lancing pain that greeted him made him jerk. Huh.

"You do realise that they might have found what they were looking for in the one they killed, right?" Owen asked, shaking the excess water from his hands before looking about for a towel. "This could just be over." He gave up on locating a towel and wiped his hands on his thighs. Sanitary. "You know, tomorrow."

Jack shrugged noncommittally. It was true. This would probably be all over tomorrow Well, except for him and Gwen, but after tomorrow, they'd be distracted cleaning up after "yesterday" and before they knew it, it would be Monday night and he could pee standing up again (He'd tried this morning in the shower. No go on that front.).

Gwen pushed off from the wall and walked towards him to inspect the dressing on his/her arm. "In the meantime it can't hurt to poke around, right? See if those mysterious cuts are something to fret over?" She raised her eyebrows; wow, he had a lot of facial expressions.

"You can do that _extremely_ boring thing. I'm about to make a trip over to the safehouse, to ease the tedium of my life," Owen said as brightly as he ever got, which was rather like a half-lit fluorescent shooting sparks from the socket. "Care to join me?"

Jack tapped the bandage gingerly. "Nope. We have work." He stabbed a finger at Gwen. "Call Storr at UNIT and sweet talk him into letting us have a submarine." He tilted his head and stared at the swirls on Owen's screensaver down here in the autopsy bay. Was that...was that a vagina? Did Ianto know about this one? Did he even care enough to tell him?

"That's busywork," Gwen murmured, and then looked at him. "I think it'd be cracker to have a submarine, though."

Jack grinned. "Go forth and succeed where I have failed, Grasshopper."

God help him, Jack observed in horror, Gwen skipped back to the stairs and up to his office. _Mental note: never, ever skip when you are back in your own body._ Sweet god. Unmanning.

"Real reason's that you wanna see the dogs, right?" he said over his shoulder, eyes still glued to Gwen's certainly deliberate sashay into his office.

Owen threw his labcoat onto the table. "Duh."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen had thrown the emergency brake out of habit, but he was glad he had, because he hadn't even cut the engine when he was distracted by something in the corner of his eye and he'd taken his foot off the brake without thinking. The car lurched forward a half-foot and then stopped short of bumping into the rear of some monster Hummer that Owen was pretty sure was illegal to own in the UK.

By the time he turned his head back to whatever he'd spied, it was gone, and he thought that maybe he was experiencing floaters in his contacts. These contacts were disposable. When was the last time he'd changed them? That he couldn't remember was a bad sign, and he should know better. At least, he consoled himself, he wasn't an ophthalmologist.

Owen liked to think that he had an eagle eye in the sense that he wasn't a completely unobservant moron. Sure, it was hard to tell when a woman had changed her hair, and he was not only supposed to notice, but say something glowing about it even if it looked like two birds mating on her head, but he often did notice things beyond his own personal hygiene and the footie on the screen at the bar.

Things like the shadows that moved across the carpark when he left his car and walked towards the safehouse building. Floaters be damned. There was something out there. He stopped and the shadow stopped for a second. Could be a mugger. Could be a drunk, though it was pretty early in the morning for that. Well, unless this was a leftover from the night before, desperately looking for a taxi and a bottle of paracetemol. Owen had been that way himself a time or two.

The lift in the carpark opened as soon as he pressed the button; not odd, since the building had barely any tenants. It was a clever ploy on Torchwood's part, since it now owned the building under a dummy corporation. Owen backed into the lift, one hand in his pocket, the other on his hip so that he could slide it back to draw the SIG from his inner trouser holster if he needed it.

The doors closed leisurely enough to allow him a glimpse of something tall and possibly not human sliping out from behind one of the few cars in the lot, the one that passed for a small lorry in another life. It could have been any number of things still, but something about the movement made him nervous. He'd been with Torchwood long enough to know that little dance his heart was doing was something he should listen to.

Owen heard the dogs before he even got off the lift, got to the door, barking like mad, which was odd since he hadn't heard them make a sound since they'd brought them here. Owen sensed the dominoes of suspicion lining up in his brain, making a pattern. He knocked on the door instead of using his key, and when he waved into the peephole, someone flipped the deadbolts on the other side. Simran cracked the door, and he heard her yell at one of the Xogs (Ianto wasn't here and wasn't in his brain) and it seemed she had to push them back from the door with her feet before she could get it open enough for him to slip in.

All of the things were agitated, barking, turning in circles. Three of them were lined at the sliding glass door to the balcony like rabid sentries, and the rest paced about the apartment, darting in and out of rooms, rapid-fire barking. Owen was glad that there weren't any tenants within three floors of the penthouse, else they'd be batty by now.

"What's going on?" he asked, trying not to scream, but instead raising his hands in a 'WTF' gesture to illustrate his point.

Simran threw her hands up. "I don't know!" she said loudly to be heard over the barking from eight throats of varying sizes. "They started about fifteen minutes ago and I haven't been able to quiet them!"

"Where Dylan?" he asked Simran, who rolled her eyes and pointed at the hallway.

Owen had brought the man (woman) to the safe house the night before after signing her (him) out of custody, and Dylan had pretty much gone to one of the bedrooms, slammed the door like a distraught teen and sulked for the forty-five minutes Owen had stuck around, eating some dumpling things that Simran had made and which ran laps around the take away samosas he'd planned on getting on his way home. He'd checked that the windows hadn't been the opening kind (They had assured and reassured Dylan that he was getting his body back the next day, but sometimes brains snapped, and he didn't want to have to explain to Simran that her real body was street pizza because he'd been too shortsighted to check the windows.

"Well, get him out here, and stay in the main room," he tried not to shout. It was difficult not to want to shout.

Owen pulled out his mobile to call the Hub, but the barking didn't cease with the appearance of his magical phone device, and it wasn't likely, so he raised a hand to Simran and gestured to the door. "Lock this behind me and don't open it unless I say the magic word."

Simran shrugged, but her face was slack with relief. "What's the magic word?"

Owen said out the first word his mind generated, like a lottery machine spitting out random numbered balls: "Splott."

Simran raised her brows, mouth working in amusement. Glad that someone was amused. "I thought it was pronounced 'Splott'."

Owen opened the door to slip outside. "Only if you're an estate agent," he muttered absent-mindedly. He closed the door behind him and scrolled to the number of the Hub, but before he could press 'dial', the lift dinged and started its descent. It went all the way to the carpark level and stayed there before starting up again. It could be anything. It could be some little old lady on the fifth floor with her groceries. Some sexy college co-ed on her way back from the gym, all sweaty and—

"Harper, you know better." Whenever he thought it was something sexy, it was a surefire bet that it was something that had more teeth in its head than he had bones in his body. The lift glided up and up, three, four, five—

This floor only had one flat, so if it came up here they—

He hit the failsafe built into the lift panel and the car stopped where it was, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floor, if the display was anything to go by. Another second revealed that the doors weren't about to bang open, and there was no sound like something was ripping through the lift ceiling to use its three-inch talons to climb the shaft wall up to his level, so Owen decided that he wasn't going to take the pause for granted, and he was a big believer in being prepared.

He pressed 'dial'.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh looked at Ianto mournfully. "I'm getting rather good at this," she commented, glancing at the Xarxian in the back of the SUV.

Ianto smiled at her. "You have a way about you, Tosh."

The Xarxian licked the back window where her hand was pressed against it. Tosh pulled her hand away quickly. "I really am allergic," she offered feebly.

Ianto was glad that this was the last of them. And this was almost the last day of caring for them. Sometime tomorrow, all the dogs and Xarxians and Dylan Smith and Simran Parikh would be back where they belonged (except for those four dead ones; that actually bothered him more than he cared to admit aloud, and he hadn't actually been responsible for any of their deaths directly.). There would be no more bouillon celery, no more using the firehose, and no more strange echoing horking noises while he tried to clean the cages. He was a little disappointed about the firehose—that was quite fun, actually. Not that Ianto ever harboured a secret childhood dream of being a fireman since being…oh, five or so.

In any case, caring for possibly four Xarxians inside the bodies of normal dogs was something he was much more inclined to be happy about, despite the lack of need for a firehose and the continuing need to stock rawhide bones.

Rawhide had disappointingly few other uses, no matter what Jack said, and smelt much like beef.

The metal access door clanged open and Ianto and Tosh both swiveled their heads to watch Jack and Gwen, a.k.a. Gwen and Jack, respectively, depending on how you looked at it, stride out of the Hub and into the carpark. Ianto opened the back door of the SUV and held in the Xarxian, whose name he was fairly sure was "Sweetie Pie" but which he would never say aloud for all the tea in China.

"Owen called. Something outside in the carpark, looking alien," Jack called across the secure area, loud enough that anyone outside the secure area could hear everything. He'd finally given up Gwen's muleheels, and the trusty red converse plodded noiselessly on the cement.

The opposite of that were Jack's boots, which should have been just as silent, but Gwen's giant clod-hopping steps caused a dull thump on the pavement. "We're going over to check it out," she told them both, trying not to look Ianto in the eye.

Ianto didn't have the heart to tell her that he was over it. After the night before, falling asleep on the sofa with Jack drooling on his T-shirt, his breasts pressed up to Ianto's arm, Barbarella getting it on with Pygar on the screen in front of them. Something about waking up in the dark hours of the morning and watching that dark head snuffle into his chest had made the transfer complete, which was sad, because it was the old adage—just when he'd got used to one it would switch back.

As he told Jack over breakfast this morning, though, he was still not having sex with him under the current circumstances. Though that had been hard to turn down when Jack had knocked on the door and offered a hand job. Also strange? Pulling back the shower curtain to see Gwen peeing. Probably best if they just kept their routines separate till Tuesday.

But now, it was easier to see Jack inside the body he inhabited. He'd changed some of the movements successfully, and others were new, but the way he carried himself in her slimmer shoulders was there. It had taken Ianto four days to see it.

"Well," Tosh said, as they braced themselves. Ianto grabbed for the leash that they'd fastened to the Xarxian's collar (Tosh had buckled it on while it had pinned Ianto to the grass in Cooper's Field and thoroughly examined his face with its tongue) before it could leap at him, and it barely had to step down from the boot. Everything smelt a little bit like garbage and he was fairly sure it was all the rancid spit that he wouldn't be able to wash from his face without Lava soap.

Tosh held the leash while Ianto closed the boot, and the thing lunged for Jack, who skirted wide of it in a little dance. "Wow there, that's the last of them." He pumped his fist a little. "Go team?"

Tosh rolled her eyes, and Ianto figured she deserved a little bit of sarcasm after the morning excursion they'd had. Torchwood officially owed her a manicure and a pair of dress slacks. "So do you need me to come with you?" she asked, her eyes wide and looking suspiciously puppy-like. Suspicious that she would know the puppy-look, since she was _allergic and all_. Ianto rolled his eyes at his own inner paranoia and irritation. Tosh was the least irritating person in the Hub, actually, and he loved her for that. On the other hand, for the last three months he'd been getting shagged at least every other night, and in the long and short of things, this was the longest he'd gone in…huh. Did not getting your gear…greased make one irritable? He'd ask Jack, but Jack probably didn't have a reference frame.

"Nope, Gwen and I will handle it." Jack prised open Ianto's surprised hand and palmed the keys. "Dad, I need to borrow the car."

Gwen caught the keys as Jack tossed them to her. "We'll fill up the tank and everything."

Ianto turned to watch Tosh struggle with the Xarxian, who was pulling on her industrial leash and sniffing the ground, a tell-tale sign that it had to—

The Xarxian squatted and pissed all over the car park floor. Tosh gave him a horrified look. Well. At least it wasn't on the carpet or something.

"You kids have fun now," he mumbled as he turned away from the SUV to join Tosh, and they walked wide around the flood of alien piss on the cement and towards the other side of the carpark as the Xarxian dragged them by the leash. Even with both their hands on it, it was doing a good job of corralling them. Ianto half wished he had a skateboard to ride so the thing could pull him along. The Xarxian's tongue hung out of its mouth, and it pulled so hard on the collar that even over the roar of the SUV's engine, Ianto could hear the ragged breathing noises that dogs made when they were choking themselves with their own collars.

Tosh sneezed.

"You can't be allergic to dogs in an alien body. There's no hair or dander." Ianto rolled his eyes at her and she looked sheepish.

"I'm sorry," she offered. "Maybe it's psychosomatic. Maybe you should--" Ianto grinned and let go of the leash so that Tosh could stumble forward with the Xarxian's lunge. "Ooof!"

The SUV pulled out of the underground carpark, and Ianto vaguely realised that he had no idea where they were going. Ah, joyriders.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

They were halfway there when Owen called again. "Okay," he said, his voice that measure of calm that meant hw was stressed. "There's something scaling the outside of the building."

Jack clicked his tongue. Gwen was surprisingly well-equipped for that maneuver. Right now, though, his usual body was busy taking the SUV in an acute turn that apparently required both hands on the wheel. Gwen was doing the old ten and two thing, and he knew that he could take it one-handed. Hell, this thing had power-steering, not rack-and-pinion. Once he'd driven with his pinky finger for fifteen minutes because he'd got concussive glue on his fingers and he hadn't wanted to a) stick to the steering wheel or b) have the car blow up while he was still in it. He might have claimed that he didn't want to explode, but the fact remained that it was easier to regrow a body than it was to requisition another SUV from the Crown. They always asked for _good_ reasons.

But Gwen, Gwen was a responsible driver. She'd probably taken a course in school. Hell, she'd probably taken one when she trained for—

"Climbing up the side of the building?" he said suddenly, realising that Gwen's driving skills, no matter how safe, were not the issue. Rather, the creature pulling a Spiderman up the side of the safehouse, unless it was Batman or—"Climbing with rope?"

Owen snorted and Jack barely heard it over the wind and what sounded like dogs barking from far away. "Hardly. The old fashioned way. With its hands." He'd probably wiggled his fingers for emphasis.

"Are those our dogs? Xogs?" Jack had no fear of Ianto and his naming quirks. Gwen signalled and paused before tuning left. They needed a 'LEARNER DRIVER' sign on the top of their vehicle sometimes.

"That would be the very ones," Owen said. "They've been very helpful in signalling trouble and blowing out my eardrums. Do we have workman's compensation?"

Jack snorted. "How fast is it climbing?"

There was a pause. "Not very, but it's sticking. There's another one in the lift, I think."

"Then freeze the lift," Jack said. "That's why we pay for that sinkhole of a building." There was a curse on the other end of the line and Jack realised that he was talking to Owen, who was by no definition stupid. "Okay, so you froze the lift. We're about—"

"Ten minutes," Gwen cut in.

"Ten minutes away."

Owen said something noncommittal. Gwen had sped up the SUV, but traffic remained heavy the closer they got to the plant, and there were no medians to drive on. Jack was going to cheerfully suggest the runner lights and the pavement, maybe leaning out the window to make a siren with his hands when she whipped around a turn and he caught sight of a billboard to his left featuring one of Cardiff's new trendy gyms for the wealthy, single and fabulous (believe it or not, Cardiff was starting to get some of those, and Jack liked them. They were shiny and well-muscled and often had flexible sexual tastes).

The billboard showed a rather buff pair of gentlemen who he wouldn't mind throwing down with, in this body or his own. Their white teeth gleamed and their shirtless chests shone and they held the freeweights that one could supposedly use at said gym.

Jack stared at the weights in the one model's hand and something clicked in his skull. Oh like he couldn't have seen it coming. He could only think that his holiday in Gwen's skull was crushing his good sense. It was science, right? His skull was normally bigger and so he was squished into this smaller brain.

This was, as Alex would have said, 'crazy noodles'.

"Oh," he groaned into the bluetooth, "Owen, lock the door and just…I dunno. Get a gun and some pots or something. Boil water." To Gwen he added, "Go illegally faster."

"Boil water?"

"Isn't that what doctors do in emergencies?"

There was a pause. "I suppose we could throw the boiling water over the side of the building," Owen said thoughtfully.

"Attaboy."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh was mainlining Claritin, Ianto was sure, when he came back from washing up and found her reading the box of instructions to the redi-tabs and peeling the backs from three of them. "They say I only have to take one," she told him. "Sceptical Tosh is sceptical."

He laughed. "You know how Owen feels about people deciding they know better than the recommended dosage," he told her, picking up the blister pack and eyeing it. It was true—they looked like candy buttons or foam. How was that even remotely effective? Rather like those breath strips that were tiny squares of melting paper, and which, when laid on the tongue five at a time made a very effective tool for—

Well. Tosh shrugged. "Owen also thinks that an appropriate gift for my birthday is a male stripper."

Ianto didn't know what that had to do with redi-tabs, but he was fairly sure that she was questioning Owen's judgement. It wasn’t a bad call—he liked questioning Owen's judgement, just not on medical things.

"Is this going to make you drowsy?" he asked when Tosh put one of the tabs under her tongue and brushed the rest of them into the bin under her desk; Tosh liked to give Owen grief, but she was a professional too, and that meant a lot of things in their little underworld gang.

"I don't think so," she replied, taking the box and pointing to the front. "It says 'Non-Drowsy formula'."

Ianto pivoted and walked towards the kitchenette. "I'll make you an espresso, then."

Tosh threw the box back onto the recesses of her desk. "Thanks."

Ianto busied himself with coffees, and Tosh was doing…whatever she was doing, when the comms went off and they both looked up. Ianto touched the comm in his ear. "Torchwood Café, fresh brewed on the hour every hour."

"No time for coffee, Mister Jones," Jack said, "my memory has been jogged." A pause. "Run, actually. Maybe a light form of exercise. Freeweights—oh yeah, Belbels." Ianto glanced at Tosh.

"Barbells?" she asked. He shrugged at her.

"No," Jack insisted. " _Belbels._ They're bounty hunters."

Tosh smirked. "Like _Boba Fett_."

There was a click and then Jack swore over the comm. "Jesus, Gwen, you can't pop a wheelie in this thing. I tried already." There was a vague curse in a male voice and Ianto realised that Gwen hadn't her comm in her ear. "Those cuts along the abdomen," Jack said. "They made them. I haven't seen them since—well, never mind that. The Belbels have a way they like to do things. Yeah, they were looking for something, but there's nothing remotely interesting about anything we've discovered in six of the pouches except the one they took and—"

"What might be in ours," Ianto finished.

"Or the box," Tosh offered. "The Bender. It still works." She touched her ear, and Ianto was reminded for a minute of watching Star Trek reruns when he was a boy. Why did Uhura touch her ear? The earpiece was in place. Was it easier to hear? Did the earpiece have volume control he didn't know about? Did—

"Yeah, okay then," Jack said suddenly. "I'm not filled with a whole lot of confidence about our assessing skills at this point." Ianto was about to huff something rude when Jack tsked over the phone. "Look, Ianto, two out of three ain't bad."

Tosh rolled her eyes. That was one of Jack's favourite nonsense phrases, possibly fuelled by a minor Meatloaf infatuation in previous years. Translated loosely in Jack-speak, Ianto knew it meant 'Ianto, you've done a bang up job, considering the circumstances.' Ianto was hoping that someday Jack would find a way to convey something breathlessly naughty using lyrics to Paradise By the Dashboard Light.

"Why would they bother going to the safehouse, then?" Tosh mumbled. She had a point. How did they even know about the safehouse? "We have all the artefacts here, and all the Xarxians," she added. Ianto called up the video on the cells just to check, and yup, there they were, all four of them, pacing and, in the case of their most recent acquisition, eating its own shit. Nice.

"They're probably following a trace signature, and they found the X…dogs." Ianto congratulated Jack on his save there.

"But if they've followed a signature to the safe house," Tosh said slowly, as if she was still working out the equation in her head. Any second now she'd solve for X. "Then they should be showing up here."

The alarms went off just as Jack said, "Well, at least the alarms aren't going off," and Tosh and Ianto glued themselves to their monitors long enough to pinpoint the location.

Tosh snorted, though whether it was with relief or amusement, Ianto couldn't tell. "It's in the tourist office."

Ianto swiveled his monitor. "And on the Plass. How are people not seeing that thing?" Tosh joined him to watch the lizard biped, about six feet tall and wearing what looked like a leather waistcoat, stalk across the Plass, right down the middle. It wasn't standing on the invisible lift, so it couldn't be using that as cover. People continued to walk by it without even noticing. Even if they had thought it was a costume, they would at least be glancing at it as they passed it. It's massive tail twitched and almost hit a pedestrian.

"Visual dampener?" Tosh suggested. "Probably on his wrist. Its wrist. We can see it through the filter of the CCTV, but if we go out there…" Her eyes tracked the Belbel doing a pretty good job of trashing the Snowdonia display. Ianto bit down a groan. They always went for the Snowdon display.

Jack's voice was urgent. "Look I can't stay on. Don't let them in, and for god's sake don't give them a reason to think you're hiding anything on your person. I'm--oh look at that. Good on you, Doctor Harper!" The line cut out and Ianto turned it off on their end before looking at Tosh.

She shrugged. "I have this thing, I've been working on," she said as they watched the Belbel stalk across the Plass and lick one of the pillars. It managed to barely avoid being run into by a pair of little girls playing with a kite. "It's like a dog whistle. Sort of." She called up the program on her computer. "Like the opposite. For humans. Wanna see?"

Ianto peered over her shoulder. "Have you tested it?"

"On Owen."

"So not on humans, then."

Tosh headbutted him in the chest with the back of her skull and she entered a keycode as they watched through the monitors. "And, now," she began, as the humans on the Plass looked up and around them, as if they has heard someone call their names. "They're hearing it, and they don't know what it is. And they're going to feel the urge to leave…" One man sitting on the steps eating his lunch simply stood up and walked away briskly, leaving behind what looked like a steaming styro of takeaway biryani. Waste of biryani, that.

Ianto watched the Belbel lift its head and look around alarmedly as all the people left the Plass., but it didn't seem inclined to leave, either because it didn't hear the signal, or it knew that what it wanted was on the Plass (or under it) and nothing was going to deter it. The one in the tourist office was much the same, but it seemed to think that a great way to express itself was by licking all the Skeet shooting brochures. Ianto made a mental note to replace them all forthwith.

"So, what do we do now?" he asked. The Belbel left the tourist office and headed down the Taff Trail back to the Plass. Its counterpart pulled a few things from its belt and waved them around. Ianto was sure they were sensors until it pointed one of them at the speaker attached to one of the pillars and the speaker blew up. "Oh, that's not on."

Tosh keyed in a few codes and the display split between two views. They got to see about three seconds of footage before the Belbel pointed the weapon at it and the screen went to snow. Tosh swore. "If they take out the next camera we're—" she sat back and took off her glasses. "Blind."

Ianto left her side and walked towards the armoury. "I don't know about you, but I've always fancied a shootout on the Plass."

Tosh followed him into the rows of firearms and picked up three magazines for her gun. "They're still invisible."

Ianto hefted the EMP rifle. "Not for long."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen and Simran carried the pot of boiling water to the sliding balcony door together, and then Simran kicked the Xogs away from it while he opened it and dragged the pot outside. She shut the door behind her and they each lifted a handle. The pot was huge, and he had to admit he was surprised that they'd managed to get this much boiling water so quickly, but they'd divided it amongst multiple smaller pans on the stove and done some in the microwave until they had a monster container that would be enough to cook fifteen metric tonnes of spaghetti bolognese. Any other time Owen would have been feeling a sense of secret delight that he was actually getting to do something akin to dumping boiling oil on something, a hidden desire that he'd always felt one should get to try out in one's life.

Simran grunted with the effort and they set the pot on the ledge. "Strange, but I wouldn't have been able to do this in my old body," she muttered. "My normal body."

Owen smiled. "Small favours, yeah?"

She peered over the edge and paled. "It's still there."

Owen followed her gaze to where the thing was about two storeys away, but the wind was blowing and it had stopped for a minute until the currents died down. There were no natural handholds on the smooth side of the building, so it was digging its claws into the brick work.

Owen looked down the road and saw the black SUV racing towards the building. "Hey look," he said, pointing to the road. "Cavalry."

The creature reached up and rammed the tips of its claws back into the building, resuming its climb. Simran made a barking noise that Owen interpreted as shock, but could have also been a response to being cooped up with eight dogs for the past few days. He resumed his grip on his side of the pot. "All right, let's get it as flush with the wall as possible and—"

The pot tipped and steaming water poured from it in a steady stream. He didn't want to dump it all at once, they literally couldn't with the weight, but he was betting that the secret to getting a body off a building was to apply as much hot oil (or water) for as long as possible. There was a stretch of time in which the water seemed to slow and then it hit the creature's leathery skin with a slap and Owen wasn't sure if he imagined the hissing noise, but he sure as hell didn't imagine the screaming.

It was more like a shrill alarm, like a smoke detector Owen had once had and disabled first thing moving into the flat. It was multi scale and shrill, and it was a good thing he had the empty pot in his hand, because Simran let go of it to clap her hands over her ears. After the past thirty minutes, he didn't blame her if the sound was sending her over the edge. The creature grabbed at its burnt head with one hand, and that must have upset its purchase in the wall, because its remaining claws slipped out and it fell backwards, tumbling down about ten stories to land in the landscaping. Owen stared at it and wondered what would happen if he were to try to fire his gun directly down. Bullets were heavy, right? A downward trajectory would just make them go faster.

He didn't have to worry, because the SUV streaked around the corner, passenger window down, and Owen could see Gwen's hair whipping as her body—meaning Jack—hung out the window, both arms out as if she was two fisting it. They must have seen the creature from the road whilst it was on the building; one of the guns was trained up to where the creature, the other out straight for a level aim. They both readjusted to the thing on the ground when Jack saw that it was gone, almost directly below Owen.

The bushes rustled, and Owen could see it from his birds eye view, but there were a few large shrubs in the way. He noted the wind and dropped the pot a few feet to the left of the creature, and was rewarded when it listed right as it fell and landed exactly on the thing with a metal bell thunking sound that repeated up the side of the building.

Jack's aim adjusted as the SUV rolled to a slow crawl, and when the creature stood up on two feet, he unloaded into it with the eerie efficiency of the MI-5 doing a drive-by. There was no audible report, so they'd either used a tranq gun or the silencers they applied when they knew they'd be shooting in public and wanted to hold off the cops as long as possible. The thing screeched again, but it was so far down that it wasn't very loud at all, and it fell down into the shrubbery and laid still. Owen dusted his hands and grinned at Simran. "Sorted."

They turned back to the sliding glass door and Owen noted that the Xogs hadn't ceased barking. That was both good and bad. Good to know that danger was still there, but useless unless they were more specific. Unless it was the one in the lift.

Dylan stalked down the hallway, hair still a mess, in the scrubs he'd worn from the hospital, despite that he'd been given actual clothing to wear, and a hairbrush. One glance at Simran reminded Owen that some people handled shock better than others.

"I can't fucking sleep," Dylan complained, and Owen the remembered that sometimes people were right _arseholes_. "What the fuck is wrong with all the goddamn—"

There was a massive hollow boom, and the walls of the flat that faced the inner hallway shook. Something metal hit the door, because a large piece of it spiked through the wood, and it took Owen less time than he'd thought to realise that—

"It's blown the lift," he said, pulling his weapon and gesturing widely with his other arm. "Both of you, get the dogs back in the bedroom, that one—" he gestured to the hallways that led opposite the direction of the lift. "Keep yourselves to the outside wall. Simran—" he bent down and pulled up his trouser leg, yanking the small .22 from the ankle holster. Jack was good for some things, and Owen had him to thank for suggesting that he go more than armed. Sometimes he wondered if Harkness was psychic. He didn't dwell on it often, because the idea that Jack would know what he was thinking was terrifying.

She took the gun in her hand and looked at it as if she'd just handed her a bag of excrement. "Point, pull the trigger," he coached. The gun was fairly simple. "Only six shots, so don't go all gangster, okay?" He smiled reassuringly and pulled her finger from the trigger to rest on the side of the gun; inexperience would end up with a cooling body and regret.

Simran and Dylan herded the dogs with a frightening level of efficiency and left him training his weapon at the front door, listening for footsteps and finally deciding that he was going to use the wet bar for cover. Hiding behind a bar in a shootout was also something that he could tick of his list of boyhood fantasies today.

He braced himself when he heard shouting in the hallway, and then the report of a gun without a silencer, which meant the Webley, and Gwen. There was some thumping, and he crouched behind the bar, gun up and ready to be pointed directly at the door.

"Owen, are you in there?" Jack called, and Owen pressed his forehead against a row of schnapps bottles in relief. "Owen?"

He didn't rise, but called out, "Yeah," and listened as someone yanked the shrapnel from the door and reached in to unlock it. "We're coming in," Jack said, and when the door swung open, Owen trained his gun on it until he could verify that it was them and not aliens with very good vocalising skills.

"Hey there," Jack said as Gwen finished wiping her hands down with Jack's handkerchief and tucking it in her pocket. "I see you found the Belbels, too."

Owen couldn't see anything but a clawed foot lying on the ground. The rest of it was out of eyeline of the doorway, but from its placement it looked as if it had been ready to break down the door. "That them? Yeah, met them."

"It's a good thing Gwen's guns hold a lot of bullets," Jack groused. "I'm not a good shot in her body."

Gwen shook the Webley. "At least you have more than six bullets," she returned. Owen was starting to think that this was one of those things they should have worked out earlier in the week—who would be shooting what and perhaps they could have practised.

"There's an _autoloader_ , Gwen," Jack said disparagingly as he cleared the wet bar. Owen could have told him there wasn't anything behind that. Jack tapped his nose and pointed Gwen down the snub hallway that was flush with the inner walls.

Gwen rolled her eyes. "You know what's more auto than an autoloader, John Wayne? A magazine. Holds fifteen, thirty if it's double."

Jack put up his gun and waited for Gwen to return. "Look at John Woo over here. 'Fifteen, thirty if I double it.' He smiled. "You need panache."

Gwen gave him the finger. "Clear back there. I think we got them all."

Owen flipped the safety on the SIG and lowered it. The dogs were barking like mad still, and he wondered if he had enough drugs to knock them all out in the spare kit in his bag.

Jack blinked. "The one in the shrubs, the one in the hallway. Where's the other one?"

"What?" Owen flipped the safety back _off_ his weapon and watched Gwen retreat down the hallway to the rooms on the outer wall of the apartment.

"Where's the third one?" Jack asked, scanning the room before sliding the glass door open and peeking out onto the open patio. "They hunt as mates, in threes."

Owen trained his weapon down the side of the balcony and stared at the wall below them. "These are the kinds of things we should all know before we get into—"

"I'm telling you now," Jack said. "It wasn't in the stairwell, and it's not climbing up, so it's…" They both turned their heads to the outer wall to the left long enough to see the Belbel smash the window to the bedroom and dive in. "Coming from the roof," Jack finished as they dashed back in the door towards the hallway where the dogs had been released and were running out into the living area. Jack and Owen trained their guns on the hallway opening and stepped around them. Owen wished he had the language skills to tell the dogs to either be quiet or be useful, but instead, they circled his legs and he almost tripped over the Jack Russell.

The Belbel crashed out into the hallway, dragging Dylan by the neck and walking towards them. It gestured to them with a gun, blaster, something space age but definitely impossible to mistake for anything but a weapon. It vacillated between holding it to Dylan's head and pointing it at them.

"Oh, helpful," Owen muttered, sighting down his arm.

Jack raised his weapon. "Drop it and let her go," he warned.

"The thing, the thing, give it the thing," the Belbel sang in a high pitched voice. Dylan clung to its arm, desperately trying to pry it from across his throat.

Owen glanced at Jack. "That's nice and specific."

Gwen appeared from the other bedroom, weapon drawn, but the movement drew the attention of the Belbel and it fired. Owen could barely see the shot blast out of the gun, he had thought that when he would finally see a laser gun like in Star Wars, the bolts would be visible. Instead, it was barely a muzzle flash and Gwen slapped her hand to her chest before falling face down on the carpet. The Belbel retreated, stepping back over Gwen towards the bedroom and dragging Dylan with it.

Owen wanted to spend a second wondering what had just happened. Part of his brain had said, 'Jack was just killed. Again.' The rest of him recognised that Jack was standing next to him and very not dead. And that part of his brain had to shut down, because Dylan was screeching, and there was a Rottweiler running down the hall towards the Belbel. They still had a clear shot, if they were really really good.

"Do you want to take this, Jack? What do you want to do?"

There was no sound from next to him, so he glanced over. Jack's eyes were wide, but he didn’t move, just held his gun out and pointed, hand shaking slight.

"Jack," Owen repeated, "what do we do?"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh wished they'd thought this whole thing through better, because if they had, she would have brought more guns. The Belbels were horribly large. Ianto had fired the EMP gun at the water tower once the lift had reached the top with them on it, and it had refracted all about (the low bass _bwaaaap_ of the gun was always amusing to hear, Tosh thought), shorting out all the electronics within a half block radius. She winced and apologised silently to the Millennium Centre when Ianto had set the gun down on the invisible lift for safekeeping and they'd stood there, watching the two Belbels press buttons on their wrist computers uselessly and speak in a sibilant language that Tosh wished she could decipher. They kept flicking their tongues in the air, as if they were smelling something, and they glanced about. The perception filter wasn't reliant on electronics, so it was still functioning.

Ianto drew his Glock and held one finger up to his lips, and then he pointed to the stone under them. It was easy enough to understand. He waited until both their heads were pointed elsewhere and then stepped back towards the water tower and darted behind it.

Tosh trained her SIG on the two Belbels but did nothing. The moment she fired, they'd figure out where she was. Even if they couldn't see her, all they had to do was spray the water tower with bullets or lasers or whatever and they'd see her. She wasn't even sure the perception filter would stand up under close Belbel scrutiny, and they were still in the centre of the Plass, well away from her.

Ianto ran from the water tower to the first pillar and they saw the movement. One of the Belbels brought its weapon up and aimed for the pillar, and Tosh fired, stepping off the stone and backing up to the other side of the water tower, away from them. She could dive behind it for cover, which she did only when Ianto fired off a succession of rounds as he moved from one pillar to the next. Tosh watched them almost forget about her, and she sprinted around to the other side of the water tower to peek out. It was easier to see Ianto as well, plastered to the second pillar.

The Belbels left the middle of the Plass at a run, but they weren't very agile. Tosh suspected that their hunting skills relied on tech, brute strength, and the element of surprise.

She fumbled in her pocket for a stun grenade. Let's see how they handled this surprise. She yanked the pin and yelled to Ianto as she tossed it out into the Plass proper, then closed her eyes and covered her ears, turning away. It was the middle of the morning, so she wasn't sure how useful the flash would be, but the bang part should have been a little bit disorienting.

It was. She heard it even with her ears covered, and when she brought her gun up to fire, Ianto was already walking through the smoke, gun up and sounding. He caught the first Belbel in the chest and the second one in the head. They both flew backwards, and he advanced on them while they were down. The one with the head shot didn't move again, but the one with the chest wound took at least three more hits from its supine position, in the legs, chest and groin.

Tosh took a second to wonder just what all Jack and Ianto had been doing off-hours. She was never going to make a tea boy joke again, and she might just be buying _him_ coffees for a few days.

Tosh stepped out from behind the water tower and was about to join him in the shoot-a-thon when a gun reported in the distance and something like a laserbolt smacked into the pillar nearest them, leaving a hole that would definitely need to be explained. And spackled. Her geometry brain sussed out the direction immediately (twelve-o clock, of course), and she and Ianto scattered. Ianto slid behind the pillar, but she felt the sight on her skin like a light sunburn before she could move far, and she froze, looking at the red dot crawling along her arm, smoking the fabric of her coat as it went along.

Her eyes raised and the Belbel finally reached her, stopping about fifteen feet away and considering her, head tilted, nictitating lenses sweeping its eyes a few times before it opened its mouth.

"The thing the thing, give it the thing," the Belbel hissed, curling one hand in and out in a "gimme" gesture. From the corner of her eye she could barely see Ianto creep around the pillar, away from her. His hand pulled the slide of his gun.

Tosh held her hands out to either side. "Thing, what thing?" she asked. When in doubt, stall exponentially.

The Belbel considered her words and then curled its claws again. It made a whistling noise that sounded strangely familiar. "The thing," it repeated. "Give it the thing."

She was about to say, "Be more specific," when Ianto stuck his arm out and let off a few shots, giving Tosh a clear path of retreat. She didn't make it to the water tower, but she did make it to the invisible lift and she teetered there, trying to slow her breathing without making any sound, turning quietly on the cement to watch the Belbel take a few steps towards the pillar. Her foot caught in the strap to the EMP gun, and she caught herself before she dragged the metal noisily across the stone. Ianto made wide eyes at her. He tapped his magazine and held up three fingers. How had that happened? And then he nodded in her direction.

A glance down at the Plass revealed that sometime over the course of the running and the shooting, Ianto's two spare magazines had slipped from his trouser pockets and were now gleaming happily and yet uselessly in the sun fifteen feet to her right. Oh shit, _really_.

She raised her hands and waved them in a "What?" gesture. The Belbel seemed to sense her hand movement and it swung the gun around back in her general direction. Again, she was back where she started—unseen, but horribly vulnerable. Her own gun was still in her hand. She could do some cover fire, or she could throw Ianto her gun, or she could--

"Oi! Think fast!" Ianto yelled, and threw something bright and sparkling at the Belbel. He pulled his gun, but dove behind a pillar to avoid the few shots of energy coming his way as the hunter shot at him before catching whatever it was Ianto had thrown in one hand-claw-thing.

The yo-yo whined up to a high pitch as the Belbel lifted it to its face, squinting at the colours, and then it exploded, taking the Belbel's hand and face with it. The body wavered upright for a moment, and then fell to the side with a thump.

Ianto left the cover of the pillar and approached the smoking body with caution, gun raised. Tosh covered him, and then they stared at the remains dumbly. Ianto wiped his brow, breathing heavily.

"More internet tutorials?" she joked weakly as they caught their breath.

Ianto's eyes were wide, pupils blown with adrenaline as he stared at the body in front of them. "Not as such, no."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jack felt the gun in his hand, he felt the weight of it, and he knew instinctively what his fingers should do. It was a clear shot, really. He'd taken one just like it a few months ago when he'd just got back. And that had been while he was rusty as hell, untempered from a year without weapons on the Valiant. He should be able to do this. But his hand shook, and the sighting he usually did with his arm and the barrel didn't want to line up, the little instinctual 'click' he heard in his head when he knew he had the shot refused to come.

He waited.

"Jack," Owen said again.

"The thing, give it the thing," the Belbel hissed.

He almost had it and then he thought that maybe he listed to the left, and if he did that he's nick Dylan and--

"Jack, I've lost the shot—"

Gwen was facedown on the floor.

"Do you have it, Jack—"

An arm appeared in the doorway to the second bedroom, moving quickly to press the muzzle of a gun into the side of the Belbel's head, and it let loose a shot before the barrel even touched the leathery skin. The bullet blew out the other side of the head to lodge in the plaster, in one ear and out the other, Jack might have said if he had been in a better place.

The arm lengthened until it attached to a shoulder and then the head and neck and body of Simran Parikh. Or rather Simran in Dylan. The body fell against the wall, taking Dylan with it, and it slumped there; Simran pressed in again with the .22, releasing another five shots into the Belbel's skull. The creature jerked its hold on the body it held, and Dylan's eyes rolled up into his head, before he went slack and fell forward when the arm holding him finally loosed in death.

Simran lowered the gun and looked at them, eyes wide, mouth open. "Oh."

Owen safetied and holstered his gun, and Jack realised that he should still have his trained on the Belbel just in case, just in case, but his eyes were having trouble not looking at Gwen on the floor. She laid face down, one leg askew, one arm trapped under her chest, the other against the wall a bit. The Webley was out of sight so she must have fallen on it.

Owen pulled Dylan from the Belbel and checked for a pulse, but he must have been satisfied with what he felt under his fingers, because he pushed the Belbel further back and nodded to Jack. "Six shots in the head. Unless there's something we don't know about these things—"

"No," Jack said, lowering his gun. He could do that. He could put his gun away. He slipped it into the side holster and blinked. What was he supposed to do now? Gwen. He should do something about Gwen.

"Is she going to…?" Owen asked. He had one hand on Simran's shoulder and the woman pulled away from him for a second before she registered his face, pressing into the wall and sliding down it to huddle on the floor. They were all mashed into a small space here.

Jack shook his head. "I don't know," he whispered. For all his joking with Gwen, he hadn't really meant it when he'd suggested that she, that she kill herself just to see what it was like. It wasn't worth anything anyway, and the risks outweighed the, the everything. This had just been a dumb accident. What if they had been in the right bodies? Would they have done it the same way? Would he have cleared the other room? Would she have blundered out the same way? Would he have shot the thing in the head long before, trusting his aim?

The dogs milled about them, now eerily silent, snuffling the bodies and Simran and Owen and Jack, winding around them or sitting on either end of the hallway like sentries. The Yorkie licked Simran's hand, and her fingers threaded in its wiry coat absently.

"I went gangster," she murmured to Owen, and he laughed and wrapped his arms around her, one of his hands reaching down to pull the gun from her loose grip on it. He glanced at Dylan, passed out on the floor and laughed more.

"I think I can honestly say that it's okay in this case," he told her.

Jack sank to his knees beside his body and rolled it over. He didn't want to confront that it was Gwen, so he didn't look at the face, but busied his fingers feeling the chest for the shot and where the wound should be healing, if not healed already. If it wasn't healed, then he would start to worry. His hand laid on the top shirt, too frightened to press down to feel the burn under the cloth.

Gwen sucked in a huge breath and sat up, flailing, and some part of Jack's brain thought, 'Is _that_ what I look like?' but the rest of him was about to cry, something he noticed was quite easy to do in Gwen's body. Her arms braced her upper body as she leant back on them, visibly shaking. A shot to the chest hurt like a sonofabitch, even for the first few seconds upon waking. Her eyes were wide and Jack knew that she was confused, she had no idea where she was and what had just happened. She might even be remembering the past minute or so of being…wherever she had or hadn't been.

Owen let out an uncharacteristic whoop and waved with one hand, the rest of his arms filled with a sobbing Simran. Jack grabbed Gwen's shoulder and pulled her sideways and she bucked him, still disoriented. It would come in a few seconds and he had to hold her, had to grab her in his arms and press against her, Gwen, in his body, back from the dead, dear god, thank god, whatever he might mutter in the night to whomever was out there.

"Hey hey," he said softly, "Gwen it's me, it's me, it's Jack."

She took in a few ragged short breaths, as if she had just finished running the Preakness, and her head turned to him. "Jack."

He smiled. "Welcome back."

Her hand left the floor and groped her chest, fingering the scorch mark where the laser had hit her, digging into the cloth to touch the hale flesh there, and he covered it with one of his own hands. "It's okay," he said slowly. "You're okay." That was loaded, wasn't it?

Gwen turned her wide eyes on him, his wide eyes on him, and her mouth made a perfect O. "I remember," she murmured. That was loaded too, but he wasn't sure with what when her face changed to something he didn't understand, and her voice breathed. "Oh, _Jack_."

Next to then, the Yorkie lifted its leg and pissed on the Belbel's gun hand, and the blaster shorted with a few sparks. Jack watched the dog scratch at the carpet and then settle against Gwen's thigh as if it was immensely proud of itself.

Well, that made one of them.

 

 **SATURDAY**

 _Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out._ (Jack Handey)

Tosh hated one part of her job at Torchwood beyond reckoning, and that was debris cleanup. It was sad, considering how much debris cleanup she did, picking up chunks of wall and door and—was that asbestos?—and dumping them in the chute that would carry them down the twelve stories to the skip that Ianto had arranged to have parked there not three hours ago. But here she was, in coveralls that never fit right in the crotch, hands wrapped in equally ill-fitting workman's gloves and a paper mask over her mouth.

It could be worse, she could be carting bodies, like Owen and Gwen. And there were two of them here. Ianto had taken care of the three on the Plass, and he'd already taken the third one from the safehouse with him. In fact, the only person not working overtime was Jack, and that had mostly been because in Gwen's body he wasn't good for the massive hefting and firemen's carries that he normally did. Gwen was normally a crowd control person, and she did clean up with Tosh, so that was what Jack was supposed to be doing.

Instead he was staring out the window at the birds winging across the bay, his hands full of wiring and chunks of demolished plaster.

Tosh had decided that he deserved a pass, because whatever was going through his head was something distressing. He'd chewed Gwen's lipstick off, and the raggedy remains of it lined the dogged skin of his lips.

Tosh tossed another load of lift door shrapnel down the chute and wiped her brow. They were almost done here. The dogs and Simran and Dylan carted off to the Hub the night before, and bedded down as comfortably as possible, Simran on the sofa, Dylan in the infirmary. The Xogs had been confined to the conference room until they could be sure that they wouldn't fall off anything or be consumed by the giant flying sheep-eater that already lived there. Tosh had gone home last night and fallen asleep in her clothes, and the morning hadn't been quite as wonderful as it should have been, what with the debris and the dust and the ill-fitting coveralls.

Someday she was going to design good coveralls for women and make a million pounds.

She and Ianto had got the Plass cleared of bodies before Ianto had gone and collected Jack and Gwen, shoveled them into his car and taken them both home with him, where, if everyone was telling the truth, he'd slept on the sofa and they'd slept on the bed.

Owen had sat with Simran and Dylan the night before, and that had apparently ended up in a little…something, because he'd not been nearly as grumpy as he should have been under the circumstances. Tosh was torn between not wanting to like Simran and feeling sorry for Owen that they were going to have to retcon her, and anything he might have had with her would be lost, since Torchwood discouraged fraternising with the retconned; it just led to memory issues.

In any case, she liked new and reformulated Owen (now with 80% less Bitchiness!), though she hadn't been paying attention to him as much as she normally would be when he was giving report to Jack because she'd been busy telling Gwen the story of the exploding space yo-yo, a story that Ianto had asked, sotto voce, could they just…leave that part out? Jack would make _that_ face at him. Tosh didn't know what _that_ face was, but she could imagine.

"Jack," she said softly, trying not to startle him too much. "We're pretty much done here."

"Can I throw the body down the chute?" Owen asked, emerging from the splintered flat door with the front half of a bagged body on his shoulder.

Tosh glanced at Jack, and he didn't say anything. He was standing next to the chute and staring out the open window at the sky. She waved her hand and Owen fed the body into the chute, letting Gwen push the bottom half in, and they all listened to the thunking of the thing falling straight down the crinkle chute to land in the skip.

"Ianto called," Gwen said, and at that, Jack did snap put of it, glancing back at them to show he was listening before looking away. "He's got the last of the the mess on the Plass sorted. Must have been nice to just toss them down the invisible lift." She dusted her hands and Owen mirrored her. "And he's called the police and dealt with that."

Tosh pulled her mask off and threw it down the chute, leaning in to watch the light blue paper flutter to the bottom like a lazy butterfly. "What are we going to do about all of this?" she asked.

Jack threw his handful of debris down the chute and turned, smiling. "This goes back to the Hub. We sift out the bodies—" he glared pointedly at Owen. "--and any proprietary tech that we'd installed. Then we'll dump it." He waved his hand. "This place. We could get someone in, I suppose. It was useful to have in a situation like this. Or for those loud parties I like to have with the strippers and the mud wrestling."

Gwen rolled her eyes, and it was such a role reversal that Tosh was having trouble parsing the reality, and not the physical fallacy of a Gwen who loved strippers and a Jack who thought the whole thing was smarmy.

"If the translation I got was right," she told them and they disengaged the chute and let it drop straight down. "Then the switch is going to take place at seven thirty-nine, which is almost exactly the time there was the first spike last Saturday, and therefore the swap."

Gwen examined her sweat stained armpits with disgust. "So, this place is clean. What do we do until then?"

Owen hit her arm. "You shower. You reek." She hit his shoulder and he staggered into the wall, but for the first time Gwen didn't look sorry. "And here we go again with the physical abuse."

Jack pulled his stay from his hair and shook it out. "You earned it this time."

Tosh yanked her own hair out of her tail and rubbed her scalp. "Well, There's plenty of unpacking to do back at the Hub," she said, and Owen groaned at her, probably for reminding them of the work that awaited them. Owen had six bodies to process; she didn't blame him to wanting the wheels to grind slowly. She had a urine-soaked blaster to play with. It was a cruel justice that that blaster was the one in the best condition. God was punishing her for being allergic.

"Yeah, that all sounds boring," Jack said suddenly, shrugging. "Let's go get lunch."

"Lunch." Gwen raised an eyebrow.

Jack nodded at her. "Lunch. The midday meal. Let's go somewhere nice." Then he seemed to see the bedraggled and sweaty and dusty condition they were in. "Oh, well, let's get takeaway from somewhere nice."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

At seven thirty-three, Ianto had corralled the Xarxian bodies in a corner of the large underground room he'd been using to run them, and Gwen looked behind her at the calm, controlled grouping of Xogs with a sense of smug satisfaction. On the other hand, it wasn't hard to herd the Xogs. They just kind of did whatever she wanted and could communicate with gestures, probably because they, like her, were relatively intelligent, no matter what they happened to be trapped inside at the moment.

Jack and Ianto had brought the bodies up from cold storage earlier, and they lay on the litters, covered up to the chests with dark logo-ed sheets. Gwen wondered when they'd ever need Torchwood branded sheets. Then she wondered if she could get some to put on Jack's bed as a joke.

She was still having a hard time looking at Jack. She was having a hard time looking at herself in the mirror for that matter. Something was dancing in her skull. She'd come back to life, and something extra had come with her. Or maybe something had punched a hole in her brain, just a little hole, but like a pinprick in a condom, it caused damage.

She was quite glad that she had other things to think about, because just the sound of the lack of sound that flashed through her brain when she thought about it made her heart beat fast. More than once in the day when she had stopped moving she'd had to put her palm over her heart, feel it beating, feel it speeding up involuntarily.

The box was set up in the middle of the room. Tosh had explained in big words and waving hands that it didn't need to be in the room with them, but then she had added that having it in the vicinity probably wouldn't hurt, so Ianto had carried it in, still covered with a tea cosy, his own hands swathed in his archival gloves.

"Seven thirty-eight," Ianto said to them, and pulled the tea cosy off and stepped back to hold back the Xarxian bodies, whose inhabitants were curious about everything they saw. Jack dumped a bag of new collars and leashes they'd picked up from ASDA on the table next to the tea cosy and the Gender Bender, four of them, to be exact.

She wondered if the dogs would just drop dead too, since their owners wouldn't be coming to claim their bodies. What would happen if Jack died in her body? Would the switch just kill them both? Or could she be trapped inside Jack's body forever? Her hand flew up to her chest for the millionth time today, and Jack stared at her.

Ianto was counting down with his stopwatch. "And three, two, one—"

The box flashed bright light, and the litters holding the dead Xarxians were pushed back violently by an invisible hand. The live Xarxian bodies fell, stumbling. Gwen used a hand to cover her eyes and when she lowered them, she could see that Jack and Ianto had done the same. It was strange to have been in the room and felt nothing, when the last time it had gone off it had been so disastrous for her. And Jack. Gwen watched Jack stare at his fingers when he lowered them and thought about what it must have felt like to be trapped inside a shell that was so very very mortal. Did he feel stymied? Frustrated? Something to ask later then, when she could stand to look at him for more than five seconds.

She was distracted then, by the change in events. Four of the dogs were running about, barking like mad. One of them lifted a leg on the table that held the box, and she was very glad that they hadn't simply placed the machine on the ground, else it might have gone the way of the Belbel blaster. The other four dogs simply sat passively where they were, blinking. Gwen could almost see the expression on the mastiff's face, one of, 'This can't be happening to me.'

The Xarxians in their real bodies glanced about frantically, and one of them began to lumber towards Ianto, who backed up a step. Gwen's hand flew to her gun, but she didn't draw it, because Jack was quicker on the draw, and he raised the gun, and his other hand in her direction.

"Stand down, Gwen."

Gwen let her hand rest on the butt of the gun in the holster, and the Xarxian stopped, the others shakily coming after it but staying behind him. It. Gwen didn't know about Xarxian genders, but sometime in all of this she'd decided it was a he. One glance at her own body should have told her how stupid that idea was.

"Gwen?" Tosh said from the comm in her ear. "It's done here. Are you all right?"

Gwen watched Jack lower his gun, and the Xarxian in front punched a few keys in his translator band. Two other Xarxians were petting their arms and touching their heads and legs and each other. The last one was rising from four legs to two.

"Yeah, we're okay here," she said into her comm.

Ianto pressed his own comm. "Tosh, you can send Owen down for the dogs."

Gwen ignored the rest of the conversation, because she was distracted by the four dogs now running free and helter-skelter all over the room. She was aware that Ianto was talking and Jack was digging into another box and handing the newly bodied Xarxians additional translators (all but one of them had been missing, possibly dropped off and eaten or something. They might be finding them about Cardiff for weeks, months even.). There was a bunch of fine-tuning and Ianto chasing a Yorkie about to strap a collar on, and Gwen ignored them both to meander to the litters with the dead bodies, now several feet back from where they started, but for all of that, completely lifeless and motionless.

Were the spirits of the Xarxians trapped in the rotting flesh? Or had they gone to some other place? Gwen scratched lightly at the front of her shirt when her heart started its rev up again. Where had they gone? Gwen had never really put much store by religion, yeah, she'd gone to church as a child and every once in a while she went with Rhys on Easter or Christmas if she'd been booked off, but that hadn't been for a while, and it was more for Rhys than her, and even then, that was more for ritual than an actual belief in a divine creator.

And if she didn't believe in that, then maybe it never applied to anything. To anyone. Or maybe she made her own afterlife. That would say a lot of things about what Jack saw when he died, what she'd seen, or where the Xarxians had just gone. Nothing? Ether. Molecules. Macrocosm, maybe. Suzie's yawning darkness.

Owen had tried to explain it one night when they'd been a little wasted, shortly after Jack had left and they'd been in a bit of a dull numbness, still trying to process the fact that he'd got up from so many gunshots and then from giving a demon from hell a cosmic cuddle that had resulted on his cooling body on a slab for about a week.

Owen had said something about hallucinations and the chemicals that the dying brain gave off, and that was why people claimed that they saw a tunnel of light. And Tosh had waved her hands and said he was full of shit and that there had to be some maker of the math. And then Ianto had said that if he was god, he would plant hundreds of explanations against his existence, so that he could suss out his real followers.

They hadn't had much to say to that.

Ianto wrangled the four dogs and held the leashes, standing by the door when the first Xarxian spoke, and it was—

"Jack Harkness," the Xarxian said, "you still run the Torchwood."

She glanced at them as they stared at her, and it took a second to decipher what was going on. Oh. _Oh_.

She pointed at her body. "That's Jack," she said, and Jack smirked and shrugged at the aliens.

"You know those Q'nog devices…" He covered the Trans______ back up with the tea cosy.

The Xarxians all let out what might have been growls, or chuckles, or perhaps they all had phlegm in their throats. But Jack didn't seem to be alarmed, and she had to remind herself that he'd been partnered with one way off in space somewhere when he'd been From! The! Future! And living a life of Fancy Swaggering Poshness.

"I'm not used to being recognised these days," Jack drawled and then paused, squinting at the Xarxian in front. "You look like—" and here he made a few extremely disgusting noises with his throat.

The Xarxian waved a hand. It seemed to be a nervous gesture. "He's distantly related." Here it leant in the way a human might, but the universal translator didn't distinguish between regular volume and whispered volume. "We don't like to talk about him much. Thank you for the watches."

Jack started. "I knew he lifted my—anyway, I think there a great deal of explaining to do on all sides," Jack said, hands in pockets now that the gun was cleared, he leant against the table with the ease of someone who wasn't in the least perturbed that he was sharing space with a creature that could probably snap him in half.

The lead Xarxian waved a hand. "You found these ones dead?"

Ianto and Gwen exchanged a look. Gwen was sure she'd been responsible for delivering the fatal blow to at least one of them. Jack had done the rest, except for the mutilated one. It was hard to tell if Jack was going to tell the truth or if he was going to ride out the wave of lies. After all, no one would know better, right? And if they didn't make these things angry, then the higher their chances of getting out of this underground chamber alive. Well, Jack and Ianto's chances. Gwen realised ruefully that she'd walk away no matter what.

It wasn't even remotely comforting, like she had thought it would be. Instead, she thought about the fact that no matter how many times she might reanimate, if these things killed Jack and Ianto, they _killed_ Jack and Ianto.

It made sense in her head.

The Xarxian and Jack stared at each other for a second and then Jack shrugged. "No, but that's a long story, and we were fully justified. What you need to explain is how you brought down bounty hunters on my house."

At that moment, there was a light rap on the hollow metal door, and it opened wide enough for Owen to pop his head in.

"So hey there," Owen said, glancing about nervously and drumming the fingers of one hand on the door's edge.

"You…you are the bringer of treats," the lead Xarxian said to Owen.

Owens face flushed. "Yeah, nice to meet you." His head swiveled to them. "Jack, I'm going to take Simran and…which ones are they?"

Ianto gathered four leashes and handed them over to Owen's fingers as they poked through the still barely-open door. "One hundred percent canine."

"Excellent. We're off to…do that thing."

"Farewell, bringer of 'noms'," the lead Xarxian said, and Owen pursed his lips, as if he wanted to decry his royal title, but instead he just nodded curtly, opened the door enough to get all four of the real dogs through it, and closed it behind him.

Gwen wondered if they could get 'BRINGER OF NOMS' branded on a t-shirt.

"Oh come _on_ ," Jack said, resuming whatever he'd been saying before Owen had come. "There are six dead Belbels who all want something you guys have. You should have seen the tech we salvaged from that one's belly. And no, you're not getting it back."

Was there was a technical term for the pouch? Probably. Were the Xarxians were offended that Jack didn't use it? Jack waved at the dead Xarxian on the end of the row, and the Xarxians clicked to each other in something not being translated. Nice bit, that. It wouldn't do to have everything translated all the time. Took some of the fun out of talking about how poorly dressed people were in pig latin whilst out for few at the local pub, that did.

"We did not know what Aubrey was trading in items on the side," The Xarxian's translator slurred out.

"I bet you didn't," Jack murmured under his breath.

"Aubrey?" Ianto asked, "His name was _Aubrey_?" Gwen didn't blame him; it was bizarre and strange that a creature millions of light years away would have a human name, albeit a rare one.

Jack smiled at him and waved to the wrist strap on the Xarxian's arm. "The universal translator approximates what it thinks would be the equivalent of their name in our language. Like Michele is Michael in French."

Ianto clasped the wrist of one arm in front of him and resumed a lax stance, a soldier at rest or a butler awaiting his next order. His eyes flitted to her and she sighed. Ianto had been strange around her all day, ever since he'd found out that she'd died. She didn't want him to look at her anymore, and if he was going to, she wasn't going to stare back.

"I have to—" Gwen turned and left, Jack's eyes burning a hole in her. It wasn't a real burn, but it would match the one on the front from yesterday.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen sat with Simran on the bench outside the TIC and stared at the lights in the Bay. Tosh had taken Dylan home, and he'd given her the retcon in three different applications: oral, injectable and suppository. The last one was really just a glycerin capsule, so he hoped she wouldn't use it. He figured if she would, she wouldn't tell him anyway.

Simran's slight frame was bruised and battered, from her time in hospital and the day before, when the Belbel had dragged her about by the neck. The cuts on her wrists were healing, and at this point in time they didn't even look like self-harm marks, so Owen wouldn't have to medically interfere to keep the planned cover story going. On the other hand, though, the cover story was going to be much easier once the suicide attempt was excised from it, and it would probably fit better with Simran's personality.

Owen had considered what he would feel for her when she was back in the properly equipped body, and that body, he had to admit, was all right, he would, any other time. There was the whole confusion of her being in a bloke's body for the week that he'd known her, and well, was she a bloke to him? Or did he start to think of her as female regardless of the body? And if so, what was it about her that did it?

Or had he been attracted to Dylan's body? Did she wear it a certain way that--

Jesus, only in Torchwood. Life was simpler five years ago, he sometimes thought, when all he'd had to worry about was not getting the clap and the occasional A&E trauma in which he might have said, 'For fuck's sake, don't step on his intestines!'

Come to think of it, he'd yelled that to Jack last month.

As soon as the bodies had switched, they'd herded Dylan and Simran back up into the atrium and told them that they would take them home. Owen had stopped in briefly for the real dogs, and they waited in the SUV as he and Simran had a beer outside on the Trail.

Owen didn't know what was happening with the Xarxians and the…Xogs, but Ianto and Jack and Gwen had been slated to take care of that, and everyone had decided that the less the two humans saw of this stuff, the better off they might be, and of course, the better their chances for the retcon to work properly.

"Bringer of noms," he mumbled under his breath, and Simran raised her eyebrow a him. "Nothing."

"I'm still having trouble believing this week happened," she told him, but her sentence was punctuated with a stifled yawn, and he knew that their window of time was closing. "I don't know what I'm going to say at my job. Or to my parents. Or what are the police going to do?"

Owen shrugged and picked at the label on his bottle. "I wouldn't worry about that. Secret organisation. We can pull the right strings."

Simran took a pull from her beer and made a face. It could have been because of the retcon (level 4 had a bad aftertaste), or because she didn't like beer that much. Owen figured that even someone who didn't like beer wouldn't turn one down after the past twenty-four hours.

"Do you think," she began, blinking sleepily and laying her head on his shoulder. "Do you think that maybe you'd like to go out sometime?"

He tightened his grip on her shoulders, so she would fall over when she slumped down, almost unconscious. One of the buoys out in the bay was tossing so violently in the wind that the red blinker winked in and out of his eyesight.

"Yeah, sure," he told her, not needing to glance at her face to know that she was asleep. "I'd like that."

Sometimes, he hated his job.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ianto was tired of being on his feet, and it seemed as if he was the only one. The Xarxians and Jack had been standing across from each other for the better part of thirty minutes, conveying information about the prior week, what they were doing here, a Rift accident, of course, and the dogs and the humans involved, and then the story of Jack and Gwen's exchange, a point that the Xarxians seemed to find quite funny.

Ianto didn't bother to point out that they had, until less than an hour ago, been housed in a bunch of canines. He was sure they wouldn't get what was so humorous about that anyway.

Gwen had flown out about twenty minutes ago, and Jack hadn't really said anything about it, but he didn't call her back or look surprised when she had just turned and walked away. Ianto was fairly sure that Gwen was at the end of her rope in some ways, and they hadn't really stopped long enough in the past twenty-four hours for her to process it, minus the few hours that her body had seemed to pass out on his bed the night before.

This was going to be one of those things that Ianto digested after the fact, really, way after the fact, since he was going to be busy for quite a few more days after this.

When his woolgathering ended, Ianto realised that they had got to the part where they were deciding what to do, when Ianto pointed to the Xogs, sitting passively with the Xarxians and blinking occasionally. "And you can care for them like this?"

Jack glanced at the Xogs, as if he was surprised to see them, and Ianto knew that he'd forgotten them completely.

"What would we do with them like this?" The head Xarxian, whose name the translator had decided was 'Eustace' waved a long clawed hand at the Xogs. "Carnivores who cannot speak or even breathe our atmosphere?"

He…it…ze had a point here, Ianto was forced to admit, but now he had a whole new track to worry about. What the hell was Torchwood going to do with them? He sensed that he might be becoming a dog person after all. Maybe Rhi and the kids wanted a dog…

"We cannot bring them with us," Eustace said, clicking his nails together in thought. "We cannot even get off this planet."

Jack coughed and Ianto raised an eyebrow.

"There's an old saying on Earth," Jack began, and Ianto resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Jack always got the old sayings wrong, especially that 'bird in the hand' one. "Something about closing a door and opening a window."

Ianto glanced at the Xarxians and frowned. "Sir?"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Owen cut the engine, stepping out of the SUV and rounding it to watch the Xarxians mill about on the grass. The trailer bobbed with the weight of the Xarxians as they stepped out and onto the grass of the field in Adamsdown. Ianto and Jack held the door in the wind so that they wouldn't wave about and hit their agitated guests.

The night was dark and chilly, quite windy, actually, and Owen zipped his coat.

Jack slammed the door shut on his side and the Xarxians jumped. Ianto rolled his eyes and shut his side more quietly.

"Oh, it's cloaked," Jack said to himself. "Those considerately sneaky bastards." He pulled one of Tosh's larger wavelength generators from his purse and revved it up, the whine of electronics singing on the air like a mechanical bird. Ianto and the Xarxians stood and waited expectantly. Jack knocked the side of the generator with the flat of his palm. "Come on you communist piece of sh—oh."

The generator let out a noise that sounded like 'squiiiiiigle squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee' and then Jack leapt up on one of the many large rocks sticking from the ground. He pushed some hair behind his ear and reached out the generator hand to wave it about in front of him.

About twenty feet away, something began to…appear in the middle of the air, like peeling back wallpaper or scraping the gray wax off a scratch ticket. Where Owen had been seeing air and a rather neutral view of the Welsh countryside in the distance, the view became an ugly shade of gray and black, the unmistakable sight of coated metal sheeting as the Belbel ship was divested of its shielding cloak.

Owen had thought it would be a smooth de-cloaking, what with all the Star Trek he'd watched as a kid making him therefore an expert on cloaking devices (He hadn't even bothered to not understand Ianto's mumbled words in Klingon when they'd driven over, just smiled and answered something from the sixth film. Kirk was brilliant.). But instead, Jack was hacking the cloaking device and it didn't want to go. It was rather like scraping paint off a wooden windowsill with a wide chisel: crude, uneven and spotty. One side of the dorsal fin-like wing at the top of the ship was still cloaked, and Owen squinted at it, trying to tell himself that even though he was staring through the thing at a spattering of lit houses a mile away on the hillside, he was actually looking at the wing of a metal and opaque ship.

He glanced at Ianto, who gave him a small smile. _"Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam,"_ Ianto whispered harshly.

Owen spread his middle and ring fingers and waved his hand minutely before they both returned their attention to the unfolding spaceship painting in front of them, as Jack stood on the tallest rock he could find and waved the generator like he was painting the air with a roller. Or conducting an orchestra. Drunk.

The Xarxians stood off and to the side, but their murmurs were soft on the wind, too low to hear over the whining of the generator, and besides, they'd turned off their translator. Seemed that they didn't feel much like letting the humans overhear them. That was fine with Owen; they obviously didn't understand what the humans were saying either. Jack seemed convinced that the Xarxians weren't going to rip their heads off, so that was enough for him.

The ship was about ninety percent revealed when there was a groan from inside it, and Owen took a step back. Ianto mirrored him, and they exchanged a worried glance. Jack waved the generator in both hands like he was either reeling in a big fish or lining up a tee off. It was hard to tell. He glanced back over his shoulder at them, winked at Ianto, and wiggled his arse. Oh, that was just wrong.

"Aaaand, BOOM!" Jack yelled as there was a metal clicking noise and then a shuddering sound like an old engine winding down, and the rest of the cloaking device peeled away, mostly from the landing pads and the nose of the thing.

Owen stepped back again so that he could see it more clearly. It was certainly large, large enough to house all of the Xarxians comfortably; it probably had multiple rooms and everything. No space shuttles for other alien species. The shape of it wasn't spherical, like in old films of aliens and UFOs, but triangular, with a high spiked fin on the top, and two flat, wings that ended in tips so pointed that if anyone had come out here and run into them with the cloak on they might have speared themselves on them.

"Oh," Jack said, a note of appreciation in his voice. "A Dathcloft 16-07. Now _that_ is a high-class ship." He smiled at Ianto. "We are in the wrong profession."

Ianto finished buttoning his coat and smoothed the front of it down. "Quite."

"Can you fly one of these things, Eustace?" Jack asked.

Eustace petted the hull with one hand, and another one of the Xarxians lifted its head. "I can fly this," it said. "Once we rip out the seats."

Jack pressed a few more buttons on the generator, and the hatch opened, bringing down the loading dock ramp. Ianto approached the ramp but didn't board; his gun was out, and it occurred to Owen that there could have been more Belbels on board, wondering where their hunting parties had gone. No, that had been over twenty-four hours ago. They would have gone out looking by now, right?

Ianto turned back to Jack and the Xarxians. "Looks empty," he said, but he didn't holster his gun.

Jack tucked the generator back into his purse as he spoke. "And the keys should be in the ignition, you know." When Eustace just tilted its head Jack amended. "It should be all ready for you."

"Thank you, Harkness, for your courage and your clear thinking."

"He always gets all the credit," Owen groused to Ianto, who had joined him to stand closer to the SUV again.

"And to you, bringer of noms," Eustace said, looking at the two of them over Jack's shoulder. Ianto had the grace not to say anything.

Owen waved a hand. "Just…doing my job."

The Xarxians approached the landing dock and tested it with their feet and hands. They were of comparable size to a Belbel, so it was actually rather lucky that this ship was here. The last time they had salvaged a ship in the countryside of Southampton, it had been the size of a cricket ball.

"One last thing. Any idea who Aubrey planned to sell that Q'nog device to?" Jack asked suddenly, one hand on his hip.

Eustace did that face-stroking thing from earlier. One of the other Xarxians bent down to pick a dandelion, sniffed it and then ate it. Owen wondered if they were hungry.

"I'm not sure," Eustace said. "But it wouldn't have been Belbels."

"The thing or things that hired the Belbels, then," Jack said, sighing. "Good to know. Still." He removed his hand from his hip and shoved it in his jacket pocket, backing away slightly. "You shouldn't be offended when I say that we'd not like to see you again?"

The Xarxian eating the grass barked a laugh. "Your vegetation tastes like dead seals."

Owen glanced at Jack, who shrugged. "Universal translators."

They watched the Xarxians board the ship, and about thirty seconds later the landing dock ramp lifted, sealing into the side of the ship seamlessly. There was no hissing gas or hydraulic sound like he might have expected. Ianto left them and went to the SUV as the ship began to whine with what Owen figured was the start-up of the engine.

Jack sighed and tilted his head as he examined the ship, eyes roving over it with what almost looked like jealousy. He licked his lips and grimaced, and then when he caught Owen staring he smiled ruefully. "My first ship was a Dathcloft 12-08. Piece of shit, but still. You know," he shrugged, "when it's yours…"

Owen thought about his first car, a crap Vauxhall he'd bought from his mum for ten quid when he'd gone away to school. It had really been horrible, and it stalled and he'd almost driven off the M-5 one night when the brakes had gone, but still.

It was odd to think that someone he knew was getting sentimental about _his first spaceship_ , but then again, he'd had to make a lot of adjustments in the past four years, and this was just another one. It suited Jack, actually, maybe it always had, even though this side of Jack, what with the spaceships and being from somewhere else and being _immortal_ and all was still new, compared to how long he'd known Jack entirely.

It didn't help that Jack was Gwen being wistful. This should have been a manly masculine 'let's bond over cars and spaceships' moment, and Owen kept checking out her cleavage.

"You know what bothers me about all of this?" Owen said as they watched the ship take off and hover over the green Welsh grass, painted into black spikes in the night.

Jack waved to the ship as it rotated in the air and tipped up by the nose. "What, my fine feathered friend?"

Owen didn't pause. "One, that you're still pretending to be Burgess Meredith at bizarre times." He paused, but Jack didn't respond. "And two, that gas thing from Monday night."

Ianto handed him a cup of coffee and he took it. "It is bizarre," he said.

"I know. I just don't think the caffeine was the only reason. I mean, a poison gas from caffeine?"

Ianto toasted him, and then sipped from his cup and watched the ship take off, the wind blowing in such a rush that they had to brace themselves. "No I meant the Burgess Meredith thing."

Jack stole his coffee and drank from it, eyes never leaving the ship as it grew smaller and smaller. "You two still don't appreciate a good line." He turned when the ship hit the cloud-line and disappeared. Ianto regained his coffee and looked at the lipstick marks on the lip. "We have to bed down those Xogs and figure out how to add them to our menagerie before Myfanwy eats one of them."

"We should at some point worry about Gwen," Ianto said. "Seeing as how she lit out of the Hub with no indication of where she was going." He glanced at Jack but didn't add anything. He didn't need to. Even Owen in his psychically null brain could intuit that they were all hyper-aware of the fact that the day before, Gwen had taken one in the chest and shuffled off the mortal coil.

Owen wanted to run tests, he would admit it. He wanted to do a full work-up on Jack's body, he always had since the moment the man stood up in the Hub after Owen had shot him. At one point in time Jack had promised to stand still for it, but there never seemed to be an appropriate moment. After Jack had skived off after the Doctor, Owen had done a full work-up of Jack's blood sample in the fridge, but it had proved to be clean. Then later it had proved to be someone else's. Jack was sneaky sneaky.

Someday, though, he'd pin the man down and get more blood and devise a whole routine of tests. For now, it was wishful thinking and something he jotted notes about on post-its in his labspace.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets and jumped up on one of the rocks that littered the grassy field. "We don't have to worry about Gwen," he said, not looking at then. "She needs time." He jumped from one rock to the nearest one three feet away and was forced to pinwheel his arms to keep his balance. Ianto ambled slowly along, next to Owen; they were two parents slowing their walk so that their shorter-legged child could keep up.

It was only a few steps, but Jack seemed to want to take them across the rocks; Owen was reminded of that game where one had to stay on the rocks to avoid the grass, or on the case of indoors, on the furniture to avoid the carpet, because the ground was considered 'radioactive'.

Sometimes he wondered what the hell children were thinking.

Jack lost his balance on a small rock and one foot went to the grass. "Hot lava," Ianto murmured.

Oh dear god.

"Honestly, though," Ianto said and they rounded the doors of the SUV. "Gwen—"

Jack pulled a small box from his pocket and shook it. "I have Gwen covered." He sat in the backseat and turned so that he could put his feet up on the seat next to him.

Ianto raised his brows. "You're tracking her?"

Owen smirked and started the engine, setting his coffee cup in the holder to his left.

Jack glanced at the tiny readout on the box. "Put a tracer in her coat. I think she's at ASDA right now."

Owen pulled them off the grass onto the C road, the trailer still following merrily along. "She's probably buying herself a fancy new coat."

Jack tucked the remote back into his pocket and pulled out a nail clipper, unfolding it to reveal the file, and started in on his nails with a grin. "That may be true. Oh well. Drive us home, Jeeves."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The wind almost carried her off the building this time, and she didn't fight against it, but swayed with it, the coat flapping about like a cape. The Altolusso pointed away from the bay but she felt as if she could hear it. All about her the ground was littered with lights and moving cars and specks that were people. None of them knew that she was up here.

She thought about what would happen if she were to just step off. Worst case scenario: she'd land on someone. That would be bad. She could land and traumatise people, children. They'd call the police and she'd have a serious amount of explaining to do before Jack or Ianto (probably Ianto), could arrive and do some magic.

There were more reasons not to jump. The first was that it would hurt. It would hurt a lot. Not the landing part, because that would be instantaneous. The coming back. Jack had once mentioned offhand that it hurt, but he'd only been barely referencing the physical pain, though that was there, as if the pain of the death that you missed by being dead was flattened, mixed, hammered wafer thin and then concentrated so that you felt it all at once in the first three seconds of waking. It wasn't being dragged over broken glass, but she didn't want to honestly have an excuse to know how correct that might be from experience.

A pair of gulls flew past her in some sort of mating dance. Maybe they were fighting over something edible. She wasn't too concerned, not even when they came within touching distance.

When she had left earlier in the day, it hadn't been Ianto, not really, and she hoped that he didn't feel badly. Probably not. Jack hadn't bothered to stop her when she'd gone, and so he must have known, that she couldn't stop thinking about it, that the blackness that was more than blackness enveloped her thoughts every time she blinked. When she closed her eyes, it was like falling into an abyss.

Maybe she might have handled dying better if she hadn't already almost died when Suzie had tried to suck the life out of her last year. Maybe she would have handled it better if she had been in her own body. Maybe she would have been better prepared if she were more religious, knew how to see the baby Jesus in a Welshcake, knew more words to the Lord's prayer than, _Our Father, who art in heaven_.

"Hallowed be thy name," she whispered, and the sound of Jack praying seemed blasphemous in her ears.

It wasn't as if she had just found religion, not really. And she wasn't afraid that she was going to hell. It wasn't even the prospect that there _was_ no hell or heaven to go to. It was that she had been cognisant of the fact that she was dead while she was actually dead, and the idea that there was nothing, and that she could be hanging in the middle of nothing and thinking about the fact that one was neither inside nor outside the box was horrifying. Nothing is a thing, right? Or the absence of a thing. Or maybe if it was truly nothing, they wouldn't have a name for it.

For three minutes or so she had been Schrodinger's Jack, and it had covered her with oil.

Her body rocked in the breeze still, and she thought about sitting down on the strut and just staying there until someone noticed her, or she fell asleep and fell off, or…Jack would figure it out. He had last time. Hell, he probably had a tracker in her coat.

She didn't want to jump. Two days before it had been terrifying and also alluring, and now it was just terrifying.

She turned, not even worrying about her balance (and it was easier to keep when she wasn't worrying about it, go figure on that one), and made her way back to the roof proper, where she meandered out to the street and caught a taxi to the one place where she could think and not think at the same time.

She had to knock. Rhys answered the door with a bed head, winky eyes, and he seemed genuinely surprised to see her, mostly because she always let herself in.

"What's wrong?" he asked, almost on a sort of autopilot, because he followed that with, "Is Gwen—Oh."

Gwen nodded and brushed past him. His cologne wafted across her face and she snapped her eyes shut for one brief second. "I left my keys at work."

"Is someone dead?" Rhys asked, following her into the kitchenette. She sat at the stool next to the counter and he flipped the kettle on.

She almost said, 'I was,' but then she'd have to explain Jack, and she couldn't do that, wasn't allowed to do that. Instead she just shook her head and picked at the fingernails that she'd done a great job of decimating over the past twenty-four hours. Rhys busied himself setting up the mugs and teabags.

"Are you still going to, you know, switch back?"

"Yeah," she murmured. "There was…there was a test run tonight. It'll work."

Rhys paused and closed his eyes, as if he had been waiting for something and she'd given it. It occurred to Gwen that she'd been so wrapped up in her end of this that she hadn't considered his.

"And you're sure no one is dead."

"Well, no," she amended, and when he didn't move she tried for levity. "But they were all bad," she said in her worst Arnold voice.

Rhys laughed, a little rough chuckle just for her, to let her know that he loved her, that she was his girl, that they were going to be okay. "I'm going to make you toast," he said decidedly.

Gwen watched him dig about for bread and didn't have the heart to tell him that she wasn't hungry, because it wasn't about the toast, and it wasn't about tonight, and it wasn't about her body, not really. "I miss you," she blurted out, unsure of what all that meant, but pretty sure of about ninety percent of it.

The kettle whistled and he pulled it from the stand to pour water into the mugs, being overly deliberate and careful. He set the kettle back in place and looked at her, hands on his hips. "You look like you're a Marmite girl," he said. She made a face and he nodded. "Marmite, definitely."

 

 **SUNDAY**

 _The difference between a man and a boy is, a boy wants to grow up to be a fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant monster fireman._ (Jack Handey)

"You realise that the Xarxian bodies that we killed had the personalities of these dogs' bodies," Jack said to Gwen as they lounged in the conference room. The Jack Russell paced on top of the table, moving away from the lunchmeat platter Ianto had brought to serve as breakfast/lunch/early dinner for the Xogs along with an assortment of kibble they didn't seem to like and a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables in which they had taken an interest. That alone would have clued someone in to the fact that they weren't normal dogs.

Their eerie silence would have been the second clue.

"So?" Gwen said, distracted by the fact that she had just eaten a piece of salami from the platter, and she hadn't realised that there might have been dog tongues on it.

Jack let the Airedale rest its head on his thigh as he scratched behind its ears. "The mastiff I get, and this one and the mutt could have been anything, but this means that at one point in time you and I were pitted against 'Wee Jock' here." He let the dog lick his face when he leant in. Gwen wanted to say something about please not to be letting it lick her face, but it wasn't her body. Not at that second. Anyway. And the thing seemed to like something on his face. With her luck it was her concealer.

Did Jack even know how to use concealer?

Gwen tilted her head. "Small in body, Jack, ferocious in spirit."

Jack blinked. "Like Rob Roy."

Ianto entered and heard the last of their conversation. "No. Nothing like Rob Roy."

"The drink and not the hero."

"Especially not then."

Jack shrugged. "Point. He could have been the one the Belbels took apart." The Jack Russell brought him a slice of salami and he let it fall on the floor. "But I think the other way is funnier."

Gwen covered the terrier's ears with her fingers and he jerked his head out of her hands. "Don't. You don’t know how much English he understands. Besides," she added as she apologised for assaulting the thing by shredding some chicken salad on the table for it. "Those poor things were under stress, and they were dogs. They didn't know any better."

Jack watched Ianto collapse into the chair to Gwen's left and reach for one of the beer bottles on the table. "Ianto, can we finally call them Xogs now? I mean, come on."

Ianto stared at him, then opened the bottle on the edge of the table and rolled his eyes. "Oh whatever."

Gwen took the beer bottle he slid across the tabletop to her with a smile. Ianto reached down beside his chair and pulled the carton of Stella from the floor. Ah, Ianto, always prepared.

Owen coasted in and sat in a chair, lost in thought but still aware enough to tax Ianto a beer (Ianto always called forking beers over to Owen 'paying the PAT (Prat Added Tax)'). Tosh settled in the chair farthest from the dogs, perched on the edge and eyes rather glassy. Ianto had mentioned that she'd been taking allergy medication, and she didn't look very well. Jack had sent her home directly from Dylan's apartment, and she must have sandblasted all the dander from her skin in a hot shower and slept heavily, but she didn't look well-rested. Gwen supposed that maybe she really was allergic. Her face and eyes weren't puffy, but Gwen's cousin had bad pet allergies, and she just got watery at the very end and stuffy and sick for most of the time she was around animals.

Tosh slid a box across the table and the Jack Russell chased after it. Jack caught it and lifted the lid with delight. "Why yes, Toshiko, I would like a tasty pastry." Gwen watched him bite into the Danish with the fatalism of one who knew that their body was being wrecked and there was nothing they could do about it.

This was their first actual debriefing, now that everything regarding the Xarxians had been sorted, minus obviously Gwen and Jack. Gwen like to think of their predicament as a sidebar that had nothing to do with the case, and in fact, she really wished they didn't have to write it up at all. But Ianto had already started them on the paperwork, and apparently, at their leisure, they were to fill out some questionnaires whilst still in the 'foreign vessel' so as to get an accurate assessment of perspectives and perceptions of being…in another vessel.

Gwen sometimes hated Torchwood. Maybe in a hundred years this would be useful to someone else. In a hundred years it would probably still be sitting in a cardboard box in the sub-basement, much like the Q'nog file, waiting for a day that would never come.

Not that she was spending any time today harping on her obsolescence.

So here they were, finally done with everything. No more mystery, or guns, or cover-ups. Ianto and Gwen had gone out that morning in their 'maintenance' coveralls and spackled the laser scorchmarks off the pillars in the Plass, right in front of all the civilians. It was amazing what people let someone in a coverall (or boiler suit for that matter) get away with without question.

Owen and Jack had dealt with the Xarxian bodies and the Belbel bodies, firing up the incinerator and having at it. Last she'd heard, though, Owen had left one of the Belbel bodies behind for study.

Tosh had been fabricating cover stories, putting the finishing touches on the lies that they had spun about what Simran Parikh and Dylan Smith had been doing that week. There was only so much they could do—Dylan had been let go from his job, but Simran had not. They could arrange that the lottery ticket tossed on Dylan's desk come up with a winning number and a few thousand quid to tide him over until he found gainful employment. Tosh rather liked that area of work, said it made her feel like the puppet master.

"Simran and Dylan have been sorted," Tosh said with a sigh. "They neither of them remember anything. I left a few brochures for Snowdonia in Dylan's flat, and there's a confirmed reservation up at a Bed and Breakfast." She blew her nose. "I got him a discount. Least I could do when making fake charges for a holiday he didn't take but has to pay for." Tosh smiled. "I also doctored some photos of the hills on Dylan's camera. If you look close, you can't even see Owen."

Owen smiled at that. "A damn shame." Then he sobered. "Simran seems to be under the impression that she was attacked by a large dog at work and had an adverse reaction to the medication that she was given. Hospital staff don't seem to remember differently." He made a surprised 'oops' gesture with his hands and face.

Jack fed the rest of his Danish to the Airedale, who licked his fingers. "The police?"

Gwen shut her eyes for a split second. "Detective Inspector Swanson has been told that the case is closed, that all charges against Dylan Smith have been dropped and that any further investigation on her part would be most discouraged." Her eyes focused on Jack's, and he glanced away, leaning forward to dig his fingers into the Airedale's neck fur.

"That's not going to stop her," Owen muttered.

Jack let go of the dog and sat back in his chair. "I'll deal with that."

Ianto sipped from his beer. "I have to admit that I'm disappointed that we have yet again fabricated a holiday for someone else, and cannot manage to book one ourselves."

Owen shrugged. "Is Snowdonia really a holiday, though?" Ianto looked about to protest, but then tipped his bottle in Owen's direction with a smirk.

"If I took a holiday anywhere in the world," Tosh mused, staring off into space. "I'd go to Amsterdam. Get caned." When they all stared at her, somewhat in shock, she shrugged, and it looked a great deal like Owen. "What? It's legal there."

Gwen decided that the least she could do was be nice to Jack's body and maybe he's regret the fifteen million stones of grease and processed flour and sugar he'd poured into her this week. She dug into the fruit tray with her fingers, fishing out what she thought was citrus of some sort.

Jack grinned at her. "You'll just piss out the extra vitamin C."

Ianto opened another beer. "Your medical health _non sequitur_ today is brought to you by Captain Jack Harkness, RAF."

Owen finished his beer and 'taxed' Ianto further. Tosh finished her pastry and wiped her hands with a serviette. It had apparently been something with lots of sugar, because the paper serviette just stuck to her fingers, tearing off in little pieces. The Jack Russell came to explore and Tosh shot back from the table. Owen called him over and poured some beer on the tabletop for him. Ianto rolled his eyes and dumped a handful of paper serviettes on top of the mess.

"And these beasties?" Gwen said, reaching to feed the Jack Russell a bit of pomelo; the animal sniffed it, and snapped it up in a second. It wasn't Danish or beer, but apparently it would do. "What do we do with them?"

Jack studied the dogs, his eyes moving from one to the other. The mutt had settled under the table, right by Tosh's feet, but the mastiff had apparently found a friend in Ianto, leaning against his chair and setting its huge head on his armrest while it made huge exasperated eyes at him. Gwen began to understand that whole pets-resembling-owners thing.

"I dunno," Jack said slowly, the gears of his brain obviously turning. "We can't keep them, but we can't let them go." He glanced at Ianto. "Can we add dog walker to your massive list of duties?"

Ianto petted the mastiff's head fondly. "I think," he said in a light and non-threatening tone, "that would drive me over the edge." Then he smiled.

Tosh sneezed and they all looked at her. "I don't know why you all seem to think I'm lying about being allergic."

Jack clapped his hands together. "Oh, yes!" And then he dashed from the room and up into his office. They all stared at each other on confusion, only to jerk when Jack's Gwen-voice thundered through the Hub as he shouted into the phone excitedly. "Archie! It's Jack Harkness! You love dogs, don't you? All country Scotsmen love dogs!"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jack dusted the coral on his desk with a feather duster he'd purchased for just that task and no other. He kept it in his desk drawer in a plastic bag, though really, it didn't have to be that clean. It just seemed appropriate, like having a cloth in one's pocket solely dedicated to cleaning one's glasses.

Tosh had been sneezing all afternoon, and so Owen had taken her home with a promise to return, but that kind of promise was like the kind you gave when you promised to visit a relative who lived a continent away: 'Yeah, yeah, sure, I'll get right on that.' Jack knew that he was a little stropped about the retconning of Simran, mostly because he rather had a thing for her, and Jack was sorry about that, but it was Owen; he'd find another shag soon enough.

Jack had been relieved that the day had consisted of things he could do in the Hub, since he figured that he had less than twenty four hours to go in Gwen's body and that with Murphy's law, sometime in those last twenty-four hours was when he would slip on a banana peel or get hit by a runaway Brains truck. One of those accidents after which they played clips of witnesses saying things like, 'It was the darnedest thing. She walked under the crane, and all of the reinforced cables snapped at the same time! That piano just fell fifteen storeys. What a freak accident.'

Of course, the Hub wasn't exactly risk-free, but he trusted Ianto to have covered most of the outlets with safety plugs, in the metaphorical sense.

He used the handrails on the steps, just in case.

That meant that when, after a light take-away dinner from the local gbk, the police band picked up some chatter about a few weevils in Butetown, he sent Gwen and Ianto. That neither one of them had argued with him or even given him a strange glance was testament enough to the fact that they all knew what was at stake.

That left him here with paperwork and a cup of cold coffee. Jack looked at the white cream swirls on top and wondered if it would be worth it to try to microwave it.

"Well," he said as he ran the feather duster along the very top of the coral, tickling it slightly. "There's always you."

The coral signaled assent by…doing nothing.

"Sometimes I think I made a huge mistake coming back," he told the coral. "I know, I know, but still."

The coral was mum.

"Yeah, well, you say that now, but I'm sure Ianto would have taken care of you, right?" Jack ran the duster down the side. "He kept you immaculate."

The coral didn't respond, which was still not very surprising.

Jack bagged the duster and tossed it in the open desk drawer. "Yeah yeah, you say that now, but later you'll feel differently when I spill coffee on you."

The coral was very very very quiet.

Jack meandered down the stairs, one hand on the rail, and drifted about the atrium level, stopping at Ianto's workstation to nose about his open rolls of blueprints and documents. It looked like he was trying to reroute the ventilation in the autopsy theatre, which was probably less about safety and more about odour. He scribbled a few notes on a post-it and then stuck it to the top blueprint.

Owen's workstation was a biohazard, the polar opposite of his med lab and theatre. There was an inch of paperwork in varying stages of completion and mixed in with high quality printouts of Playboy centrefolds past and present, which accounted for the massive amount of money they'd been spending on laser printer ink. Jack drew some smiley faces in very inappropriate places on a few of them and tucked them back where they had been haphazardly hidden.

He ate about fifteen of Tosh's sweeties, tried to mess with her code, but she'd locked them all out of her workstation. That was for the best, he was sure, but also slightly worrisome and a bit of a security issue. They were going to have to have a talk.

Gwen's desk wasn't there. He was sure. There _had_ been a desk there at one time, but now it was buried in clothes and papers and a few crumples bags and three different coats. He saw a small box of shoes off to the side of the desk, and slipped off his trainers to try on a pair of heels that she'd probably brought to work with the intention of wearing them out to dinner with Rhys directly after she'd got off, but which were still here. Jack wondered if Gwen had had plans with Rhys this past week that had been interrupted. He'd certainly had plans that had to be cancelled.

Well, okay so it was an ongoing thing, but still, Ianto had put it on hold.

He put Tosh's bluetooth in his ear and pressed the button. "Hey there!"

There was the sound of grunting and breathlessness that meant that they'd been running. "Jack?" Gwen's voice—his voice—sounded worried on the phone. "Is everything all right?"

He sniffed an open canister of something from Owen's lab table as he wandered the room. "Oh nasty."

"Jack?" Ianto panted. "What's wrong?"

He opened a morgue drawer. Oh hello, Belbel number six. Lookin'…frozen. "No, nothing nothing," he mumbled. "Just checking in on my favorite—"

"Gwen, he's got a knife," Ianto said calmly, and there was a sound of breaking glass. "And a broken bottle. Lovely."

There was a gunshot and Jack reached up to turn the volume down on his comm. "Are you guys okay?" He slammed the door shut and jogged up the stairs to Owen's workstation, where he couldn't key anything up because Owen had locked his workstation as well. He started to punch a few buttons on his vortex manipulator, and then realised that he had everything he needed to track Ianto and Gwen up in his office

Ianto made a noise like he'd been hit in the gut. "Ianto is—getting sucker punched by a Weevil," Gwen said in an almost amused voice. "Mine had just discovered tools, but I shot it in the knee."

Jack double timed it to his office and settled in the chair, but his weight was so much lighter that he coasted back too far on the rollers and had to pull himself back with his fingertips on the desk edge. The trackers on the comms showed them under the ground somewhere around the Grange Gardens. "Clever girl," he finally told Gwen, but she wasn't too busy yelling at Ianto.

"You have to get it in the—"

"I know how to do this, you know," Ianto snapped, and there was the sound of his fist impacting with something hard that crunched, most likely a face. Jack hoped it wasn't his face. That would bruise.

"Classy," Gwen said. "Bag it."

They must have been bagging their weevils, because they were breathing hard but silent, and Jack drummed his fingers on the desk, trying to think of something to say. He picked up his cold coffee and sipped it experimentally. It was true; Ianto's coffee magic turned back into a pumpkin after the coffee had been sitting for two hours.

"Are you getting on—"

"Jack, we're rather busy so unless you have—where did that come from?"

"Whoa, he's coming right for you—"

"I have it, I have it."

"YEOW!"

"Oh, sorry. Look, just wipe it off your—"

"I know how to use a handkerchief, Ianto."

"Wow, that was a close one," Jack murmured conversationally, and there was silence on the other end.

"Jack," Gwen said, and he knew his 'irritated' voice when he heard it. "Is there anything you need?"

He cast about and lost his grip on his coffee mug at the same time he was gesturing with it, and the mug tumbled in the air, the cold coffee spinning out in all directions, onto his desk and the lit coral. The mug rolled to a stop on the desk, kept from falling to the floor by its sturdy and apparently slippery handle. "Oh, I spilled my coffee."

"You called because you spilled your coffee?" Ianto groused. "Are your hands painted on?"

Jack stared at his clumsy hand accusingly and wondered if the coral would forgive him for dousing it in Ianto's cold Chanchamayo. "One might think so," he answered slowly.

Gwen made an exasperated noise. "We'll be home soon."

He only noticed the 'home' part after they'd clicked out. An odd choice of word, that. On the other hand, everything was odd this week, including the fact that he had to pee again.

Jack looked at the dripping coral and sighed. "I told you this would happen," he told it, picking it up. "Come on, we need a bath."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Most of the lights were out when Gwen came up from the showers. She hadn't bothered to use Jack's small shower, but chose to wash up in one of the basins in the communal room, scrubbing the grease and goop from her face and hands with brisk gestures. She didn't smell too bad, so she planned on falling into the bed and sleeping a few hours before she woke on Jack's preternatural schedule, and she'd shower then, quiet her mind a bit. It would give her something to do.

Gwen figured that Ianto had taken Jack with him, and so she hadn't expected that, when she kicked her shoes under Jack's desk, he would hear his voice—her voice—call up from the quarters below the ground.

"Ianto?"

Gwen knelt down and peered through the hole from above. She could see the edge of the damp bed, but nothing much else. Jack had put a braided throw rug down there at one time, and she could see the ragged reds and blues of it from here.

"Ianto went home," Gwen said, her fingers tracing the top rung of the ladder.

"Ah," came from below.

She waited for more, but there was nothing. She wasn't sure what else she could or should say. "Do you need something?" she asked, which was stupid. That was Jack's private room, and he was more familiar with the business and amenities of the Hub than she would ever be. Jack should have been asking her if _she_ needed anything, starting with the secret stash of Haagen Dazs that Tosh had around here somewhere.

"Nah," Jack said.

Jesus, he couldn't shut up on the comm earlier and now he was downright laconic.

"I'm coming down," she said, "for my toothbrush."

Her feet were already on the rungs and descending by the time Jack replied with, "Okay."

Gwen jumped down the last three rungs of the ladder and turned to where Jack was sitting on his bed, cross-legged and examining his knees. "What are you doing down here?"

Jack looked up at her, his face freshly scrubbed, hair still wet. Obviously he had figured out how to wash the make up off properly. Part of her wondered why he had even bothered wearing it this week. Then again, why had she bothered trying to figure out the mystery that was Jack's hair styling technique?

"I'm contemplating my last day in your body," Jack said. "I should also have not eaten that pasty this evening. You have a sensitivity to preserved meats." He grimaced and rubbed his belly.

Gwen nodded, shoving her hands in her pockets. "Ah."

"You?"

She shrugged. "I was going to 'sleep'—" Here she made finger quotes. "—but I'll just brush my teeth and take the sofa upstairs—"

"Oh hell," Jack said, swinging his legs off the bed. "I didn't think about—"

Gwen put a hand on his head, ruffling the wet strands. "Don't."

He stayed where he was while she darted into the small toilet off to the side and brushed her teeth and used the mouthwash that Jack apparently should purchase stock in, he had so much of it. Three bottles in a cardboard box under the sink alone.

"Floss," Jack said mockingly from the bed. "I have to take those teeth through eternity."

Gwen might have argued, but she didn't have the spirit for the weight of the joke. Instead, she flossed and rinsed again and flicked the lights to the toilet off when she exited, dimming the room by half. Jack blinked and they stared at each other, waiting for their pupils to adjust.

"I've thought about it," Jack said, bouncing on the bed. "And I think we should share the bed."

She crossed her arms and stood in front of him. "Really."

Jack patted the bed beside him. "Not really. I'll crash upstairs. You're like a whole foot shorter."

Gwen sat on the edge of the bed and considered how they never seemed to have a problem switching back and forth between _my_ and _your_ when referring to these bodies. _You're shorter,_ not _I'm shorter_. That was healthy, right? That she could follow him must have meant something too.

They sat in companionable silence for a few seconds, and Gwen glanced at the covers. The bed was small, she knew that from sleeping down here a few nights ago on her own, but it was even smaller for the fact that there were two of them on it. She wanted to ask, flippantly, how he and Ianto managed, but he'd just leer at her and offer to show her personally, and then she'd have to think of an excuse not to let him. It didn't seem right, shagging Jack ever, no matter what body he was in.

On the other hand—

No.

Gwen reached out to Jack and ran her fingers through his hair. "I have split ends."

Jack peered at her fingers, but they were too close to his face and his eyes crossed. "So you do." He refocused on her. "I didn't do that," he added defensively.

"I died," she said to him suddenly, meaning for it to be more complicated than that but finding that it didn't need to be. "Friday."

Jack nodded solemnly. "Yes, you did."

"But I came back."

"That too."

"I don't really know how to think around it."

Jack smiled ruefully. "Then don't. It wasn't your death, Gwen, it was mine. Just like that might be your body right now, but it's not, not really, no more than these are my feet or eyes or quite lovely bosoms."

"No one says 'bosoms' anymore."

Jack picked at her braces. "They do when they're trying to seduce the person those bosoms belong to."

Gwen looked at the low neckline of the shirt that Jack had picked to wear—without a bra—and something in her trousers stirred. "And whose bosoms are they?" she asked.

Jack leant his face in to her and that afforded her a look at said bosoms. "Yours," he whispered.

Well then. "Consider me…" Gwen didn't bother to play at it anymore and just met Jack's mouth with her own.

It was hard to not think that she was kissing herself, but she'd never done _that_ with her mouth quite that way, or tried _that_ before in such a manner. It was Jack steering her body, like watching film of two different racecar drivers try out the same car. Jack was all thrust and impatience, all dippy head and tongue, and he didn't seem to care that he had her neck in his hands and was driving into her. She didn't know what to do with her fingers, so she used them to pull at Jack's top. He inched around and squirmed until she'd pushed it down his arms and chest to ring about his waist, and when he stopped kissing her mouth long enough for her to pull back, he pressed his forehead to hers, his breathing hard and heavy.

"It goes without saying that any time you'd like to—" She cut him off with her mouth, fastening to his in a blur and a bit of an awkward smoosh of lips, but that did what most kisses do—it sorted itself with some head tilting and heavy breathing and her hand on his shoulder, his wet hair cascading down to drip little runnels over her skin.

Jack's fingers pulled at her buttons and she let him. He slipped the shirt off without the slightest hesitation, following the exposure of flesh with his mouth. Her button-down peeled away and the vest slid over her head; his breasts were cool against her chest and she shivered for a second when Jack bent and ran just the tip of his tongue down her chest, along the pectoral muscle and finally to her nipple, taking it into his mouth and swirling his tongue, like she had done millions of shags before with other men.

It was an awkward shimmy, to get her out of her trousers, get Jack out of his knickers. They had to navigate her socks and the rest of it, all without taking their mouths from each other's bodies. She wanted to taste the hollow of his neck, wanted him to never stop sucking her earlobe, wanted to see what it felt like to rub more and more of her skin on his, what would that be like?

But there they were, tangled together, still sitting up in the bed, hands and mouths everywhere, his hair in her face, it smelled like strawberries, and her engagement ring clinked on the metal of his watch when they brushed each other. Gwen looked at it for a second before Jack drew her face away from the sight with a shake of his head and his finger on his lips. That hand slipped under her jaw and brought her in for another round of kisses, light and then harder and harder as feather down and wind turned to stones and fire with his tongue, with his grip on the underside of her chin.

And then his fingers found her cock, and it was all over.

The sensation was not unlike being fucked inside out, she mused, that she could feel him, three-sixty around her, and he was warm and soft and pulling at her foreskin, all the way back and then all the way forward, and that hurt a little at the extremes, but as the saying went, the good kind of hurt. Her fingers scrabbled on his leg, she tried to tell him that this is how it felt, but he knew, he knew and his laugh in her ear told him that he knew exactly what it felt like. His free hand clasped one of hers and guided it between his legs as they hung off the bed.

She slid her fingers through Jack's pubic hair, threaded and tugged at the strands and wiggled a finger in between the folds of flesh to find his clit and he bucked a bit, sucking in a breath when she rolled it under her finger, her mouth moving in for another kiss. Jack kissed like he was in flames, like he needed to get somewhere, like he needed to fuck and suck his way there, through her body, and take her with him to his final destination.

"You can be on the top," Jack said into her ear after leaving a mark on her neck. "Do all the work." He squeezed her cock in his hand and chuckled when she gasped and thrust up into it. "Or I could be on top and help out a—jeez, you have to stop that." He plucked her hand from his lap, licking her fingers. The sensation didn't shoot down to her cock so much as the feel of his tongue on her fingers reminded her cock of what that tongue could feel like on it instead.

Gwen ran her hands along Jack's breasts. She wanted to lick them, taste them as they hardened because of what she did, and when she leant in and her mouth fastened on a nipple, Jack threw his head back a bit and groaned. "I don't think I can be on the—"

 

Gwen bit the nipple, trying to remember what she liked in this body, where the sensitive spots were. Jack certainly wasn't shy about reaching for all his favorite spots, and soon they were licking and touching and groping, poking and rubbing along each other's bodies with the confidence of people who had been doing this for years. Because they had, really.

"How's this?" Jack said when he rolled her balls in his hand and she felt a tightening there and had to breathe slowly, stop her fingers from exploring his perineum while her thumb stroked his clit.

"That's, oh, yeah, that's."

Jack grinned. "I've always thought so."

Gwen wondered if she could hold on to this feeling, like the world was attached to her cock, and whenever Jack touched it, squeezed it, brushed it with skin or hair—he hadn't even put his mouth on it—she couldn't help the surge of her hips, and she understood now, the whole drive to put your dick in something, anything.

Jack bent over to the bedstead and Gwen ran her fingers up his cunt from behind. He almost fell off when she speared him with two fingers, but she grabbed his waist with her other hand and steadied him as he searched in the drawer for whatever he was seeking.

"Lie down," he told her, pushing on her shoulders and sliding down her body, his hair sending shivers across her skin. His tongue darted between his teeth and just the tip of it drew a line down her belly to her cock. He pressed his face against the length of it, and then buried his face in the hair at the base. "Ah, hello there. Long time no see."

Gwen reached down and tugged at his hair impatiently, something she remembered that she hated but couldn't keep herself from doing. "You're going to draw this ou—uuuugh." It was a devolving thing when Jack simply took her cock in his mouth all at once and swallowed in the back of his throat, moving his tongue against the underside before bobbing his head, humming and drawing his lips back up so that he could smile at her. His tongue worried the slit and one of his hands played with her foreskin, but Gwen could only stare at him, his secret smile, _her_ secret smile, as he gave the head of her cock a sloppy kiss.

"Everyone should be deep-throated at least once in their lifetime," he told her, and then proceeded to do just that.

Gwen didn't even know that she could suppress her gag reflex. Jack could do things with her mouth that she had never tried before. Her body was a violin that she used to play _Chopsticks_. Jack could play _The Flight of the Bumblebee_.

Or she might have been thinking with her JT, which was novelty enough, and apparently justified. She reached down and grabbed Jack's hair and he covered her hands with his own, letting her hold him in place while she fucked his mouth just a little. It was mostly gravity doing the work, and Jack's tongue and lips and some sort of musical number he was humming that sounded vaguely like 'Copacabana'.

She didn't know how long it stretched on, probably only thirty seconds or so, because just when she felt something building, felt an inevitableness that gathered low in her, Jack pulled off with a final lick up her cock and smiled. "Maybe we'll finish that later. For now—" He righted himself and inched up on his knees until he was almost sitting right on her cock. He opened the condom wrapper with his teeth and spit the edge off into the darkness. She reached up to do it, and he batted her hands away, pressing her shoulders back into the bed. "No, this is for me."

Gwen closed her eyes and felt the condom roll down her cock, muting the touches that followed, but still a little out of control. It was easier to think for a second when the condom went on, Jack's fingers rolled it as far down as it would go, and he bent in for a kiss, licking her lips and biting at her gently before pulling her bottom lip in his teeth and letting go. His cheek slid along hers until he with flush with her ear.

"Are you ready?"

All she could do was nod. Her hands were useless beside her, but he gathered one up and drew it to her cock, helped her direct it instead of doing it himself.

Jack was all _stop_ and _okay now_ and _wait, let's try—oh yeah_ and the occasional _oh you're huge_ , and Gwen found that she had words of her own, like _what are you…?_ and _right there_ and _oh shut up, Jack_ , but she never needed to say them, because he had her covered. He rolled and bucked, ground himself against her, lifted, dug his hands under her back and pulled, sped and slowed. Jack was the master controller, and she felt heavy, paralysed by the sensation in her cock. She wanted to flip him over and _pound pound pound pound_ until something happened, till everything crested, till she came, she guessed.

"Do you want to…" Jack trailed off as he pulled off almost the whole way and smiled; she knew that smile. It was her smile, and it went with that maneuver. She did what Rhys always did (oh god Rhys) and reached out to slam Jack's hips down and Jack fell willingly, laughing the whole way until they were chest to chest. He slid his legs from her sides and on top, lying completely on her from shoulders to the tips of his toes, so that her cock was squeezed inside him, and also between his legs, and her balls were crushed in the press of their bodies together, and it was like heat and light and _things_ burst in her head and she could feel herself losing everything.

She bucked up into him as he ground himself down, arching his back and pushing himself up with a hand on either side of her so that all of his weight rested on the join of them both, rolling in circles. Her hips pumped up into the pressure, and the noises she made, while not high on her list of worries, weren't remotely sexy. It was true; making alluring noises while you were having an orgasm was impossible for a man. She would mock no more.

Jack did some sort of satisfied "hnnnnh" noise and increased his efforts, this time sliding his knees back down to either side of her and taking her cock to the root and then working himself against her pubic bone. She rested her hand on his hips and pushed up as much as she was able, but all her energy seemed to have vacated her and was trapped in the reservoir tip. Ha.

Jack's forehead was shiny with sweat and he grunted now, face twisted in concentration, eyes closed, and he murmured under his breath in wispy little whispers, _Right…there….right….there,_ until he rammed hard against her and pressed for one long moment, his mouth wide open, his eyes screwed shut, hands clenching her shoulders when he came, his voice an inward strangled breath.

He hung over her for a second, waiting, feeling, all but vibrating with the sensation, his hips still swaying for aftershocks to hit him, and when he clenched around her softening cock she all but groaned. There were a few satisfied one syllable laughs that sounded like 'huh huh', and then he lowered himself to lie on her, his face buried in her neck.

"Oh, wow," she breathed.

Jack laughed in her ear, his chest sticky and hot against hers. "Oh, yeah, that's what I'm talking about."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Gwen was 'passed out' (he used the finger quotes in his head to amuse himself) in the camp bed and would be for a little while longer, if he remembered himself as clearly as he did. Jack stared at her sacked out on the bed, arms and legs splayed. She'd all but pushed him off the mattress, and so he'd yanked on one of the button-downs from the closet and tugged on her knickers before ascending the ladder and making his way through the darkened Hub towards the kitchenette. Ianto had left him some of that instant hot chocolate, and by God, he wanted it.

Some the lights flicked on when he passed them, motion activated, which was handy since the Hub didn't have many walls upon which to conveniently place light switches. Jack caught sight of himself in the glass from one of the transparasteel walls and started. He'd forgotten that he was…not himself. Easy to forget, when he was, for the first time in a week, quite thoroughly shagged. He was used to that feeling and this past week of famine had been a bit of a shock.

Gwen had needed it, more than he could tell her and more than she could articulate; it sounded smarmy and opportunistic to sit her down and say, _Gwen, darling, you got blown away and that made a little bit of a hole in your mind, and now we're going to fill that with a good hard fucking_ , because he didn't think that was exactly it. He'd always been up for the fucking, any kind, all kinds, well before Rose had fallen off a barrage balloon and subsequently altered the course of all events for him, forever. So no, it had been a guess, a thing that he used, when he was frightened and tired and whatever had punched a hole in his chest this week had taken pieces of him with it, and he needed to get them back. For him it was fingers and legs and mouths and those noises that people made when they were on the edge of delight, the edge of bursting out of their skin at the end of a rattlingly good fuck.

Except, you know, not actually _bursting_ out of their skin. There were limits to sexy on this planet.

He dug around in the cabinets under the sink and uncovered where Ianto kept all the latex gloves, a useful bit of info for a much later date. He rummaged in the cabinets to the left and found fifteen packets of ramen noodles that he was sure had belonged to Suzie. And then to the right of the sink was a canister that Ianto had recycled and refilled with what this anally precise handwriting spelled out as _Jack's Cocoa :) Do Not Touch >:(_. Lovely.

He was in the middle of tinkering with the electric kettle when his manipulator lit up like Cardiff New Year's and all of the computer screens in the place came alive as if someone had wiped the screensavers off all at once, pulling a tablecloth out from under a pile of dishes on a table. The audible alarms didn't go off, and Jack would have paid a great deal to learn _that_ magic trick, he decided as he abandoned his drink and made for the closest workstation.

He was halfway there when the Belbel came up the autopsy theatre steps, the dead and cold corpse of presumably its kins…person over its shoulder, tail dragging on the ground behind them both. Jack froze and the Belbel froze and they blinked at each other for a second before he heard the sound of snakeskin on cement and saw another one out of the corner of his eye. He raised his hands to show that he was unarmed, but he would have felt a whole hell of a lot better if he knew where the third one was.

Oh and he wouldn't have said no to a stab vest and a firearm. Maybe an indestructible body. A flame-thrower.

A mirror would have done the job in a pinch.

The first Belbel stood with the body over its shoulder, hissing and clicking to the others, and Jack turned his head slowly to watch the second one root through Tosh's workbenches, pushing aside tech and wrenches and spools of wire.

"The thing," the second Belbel said to him when he made eye contact, "give it the thing."

This again. He began to lower his hands and open his mouth, but there was the whine of a laser blaster revving up, and the spot appeared on his chest. He followed the red line of the sight up to the ceiling of the Hub, where Bachelor/ette number three waited at the opening to the invisible lift, gun calmly pointed at him. Always good to have a man on the roof, as it was.

"Jack?" Gwen said behind him and he turned his head so that he could see her behind him, in the doorway to his office, her firearm out and pointed. He crooked two fingers in one of his upraised hands to tell her to stand down.

The Belbel tried again. "The thing, give it the thing." Its eyes roamed Tosh's workstation.

Jack could see the Q'nog Trans______ right under the tea cosy. It was clear as day. Someone, probably Owen, had written 'seX-Box' on the green quilted surface with a marker. Even if they didn't read, didn't get the joke, how could they not see that it was the right size for the Trans______?

"We're going to have to have a little discussion about this thing you're looking for," he drawled, "because we still kinda need it."

"Jack," Gwen said, "Let them take it. It's not worth it."

Jack watched the Belbel sniff the cozy and lick the material with its tongue. "The hell it's not," he said softly. "Look," he said, "I'm more than happy to give you the box, but you have to wait for another…" he drifted off when the Belbel picked in a pile of things on Tosh's desk and came up with something small and spherical and shiny. Golden. "Day," he finished, and it was apparently completely anticlimactic.

The Belbel sniffed the ball, and then licked it. It raised its eyes to the other one across the atrium, and then barked and clicked and hissed, its throat exposed and head lifted to the ceiling, at Sharpshooter McGill up there.

"Jack," Gwen began, but was cut off when the Belbel snapped a bunch of clicks at its counterpart and pocketed the ball in a pouch at its waist. Then it backed away from him and towards the invisible lift.

The Belbel with the body passed Jack without looking at him, but he was sure that if he had become a threat or even a minor nuisance it would have batted him around like a football and possibly slam-dunked him in the basketball hoop. He left his hands where it could see them, and when it had walked around him it turned its head and hissed something in his face. Its breath smelt like rotting flowers. There was him told off.

When the two Belbels were at the lift, they boarded with the body and Jack watched them begin to rise. The lift was halfway up when the second Belbel pulled something from its waist and tossed it down at Jack, probably a thermal detonator of some sort, and Jack ran for cover. Stupid thought, that. If they were tossing an incendiary device or even a viral device down here, there would be no where Jack or Gwen could run.

He skidded anyway and dove for the sofa, hitting his head off the coffee table in front of it before he could stop himself. Behind him he heard Gwen clatter down the stairs in her barefeet, and when the lift finally clamped closed, she was already pulling him upright and rubbing his scalp, looking for open wounds.

"Jack, Jack, are you all right?" She cupped his chin in her hand and turned it to face her, and he blinked a few times.

He probably didn't have a concussion, but he was seeing stars, and his forehead hurt quite a bit. He explored it with his fingertips, feeling for bleeding and finding none. Good. He didn't want Murphy's Law to screw this up for him or Gwen.

If needed, he reminded himself that he could point out that he had in no way, shape or form encouraged any of the danger they had just encountered. Except for the thing about diving and hitting his own head, a course of action that he decided had been useless, seeing as how they had not exploded or begun to hemorrhage from their eyes.

He and Gwen scrabbled on the floor by the invisible lift for a few moments before Jack found the thing the creature had tossed (he wondered if they were having a hearty chuckle at his running for cover act), balanced on the edge of the hubtub and waiting for a breeze, a Myfanwy fart from above, to blow it in. He plucked it from peril and peered at it—it was a datachip.

"That looks like a flashdrive," Gwen said, following him back to Tosh's workstation.

"It is. Pretty much. The fifty-third century's equivalent of one, actually. They went to a bit of deliberacy to give this to us. Let's see what they wanted us to know," he murmured. Jack stuck the chip into the data port on one of Tosh's external hard drives and hooked it up to the monitor. The language was Belbel and Universal, but his skills were rusty and the text was from this time, which meant that it was the equivalent of reading Chaucer as far as his home language was concerned.

Tosh was good at many many things, and one of them was translating written languages and building databases of them. It took Jack a few seconds to find the filters he wanted, and in the end he got the Babelfish version of what it probably said, but that was good enough. This wasn't To Serve Man or anything. At least he hoped it wasn't.

"It's payment," he said, slightly stunned. "They've just handed over three hundred million credits." He whistled. "Wow."

Gwen leant against his back and peered over his shoulder at the monitor. "Whatever for? I thought they were bounty hunters."

Yeah, that bothered Jack, too. He pressed a few buttons and then switched to the secondary unit on Tosh's workstation, sifting through her week of work to find the thing he was looking for. "Working on that," he said over his shoulder.

Gwen let him search, trusting that the answers would come in due time, of course, and in the interim she looked at the first screen, poking it with one finger. "How much is that anyway? In…Earth…money." He knew how dumb she felt saying it and could barely resist a snort.

"Let's see," he mused, still scrolling through Tosh's apparently myriad scans of the Q'nog Trans______. "On today's exchange rate…did you know that you can rent Liechtenstein for a whole day for about three hundred grand?"

Gwen laughed. "We could rent Liechtenstein for a day?"

Jack winked and she caught it in the monitor reflection. "We could lease it until the end of the next century. Make Torchwood: Europe." He shrugged. "On the other hand, consider EuroDisney. We could just save it for the next time we're in New Las Vegas and squander it on 3D blackjack. Ah, Tosh, you are too thorough for your own good. Here we are." He blinked back and forth at the two monitors, eyes flitting from one identical picture to another. "Oh, they paid us for retrieving it."

That was…not normal.

The test folders opened in front of him and he peered at the first one, a simple snapshot of the thing itself. Not very useful. But when he accessed the interior scans the infrared took, that was a different story. The ultraviolet wasn't very useful, but the x-ray Tosh had thought to do was illuminating.

"That music ball thingy?" Gwen asked. "I thought you said it was like a rain stick. And also broken."

Jack watched the very bland and undetailed schematics unfold on the screen. Tosh hadn't done more than take the scans and then set them aside for a later day, what with being distracted by the Q'nog Trans______ and all. But sooner or later she would have seen them, and she would have brought them to Jack, and he would have put it together.

"It's not a music ball. It's supposed to look like one. A broken one. Oh son of a bitch, we're lucky." He peered at the schematics and the language on the edges of them, language that looked familiar, like the other screen, the one showing him the readout of the—"They weren't paid to retrieve this." he murmured, eyes still trying to make all the connections in a way that would make sense to the time line and the—

Since when did time have to be all linear on the Rift? He knew someone who would have beat him about the head for thinking that way. Well, no, he'd just roll his eyes and smile, but that was pretty much the same as beating about the head.

"Oh fuck," he breathed out, and Gwen's head darted over his shoulder in response to the cuss. "Fuck me up the arse with—"

"Language," Gwen murmured. "What is it?"

Jack ignored her, eyes running along the translation and the lines painted on the inside of the ball that the scans had lit up like Kirlian photography. "That's why it made the gas, and it killed that Xarxian," he murmured. "It was too much to carry inside, and it just…" He sat back in Tosh's chair and almost fell off, because he had sat on it sideways and forgotten that the back wasn't behind him. Gwen steadied him with her hand.

"This is all lovely and disturbing. But tell me more so that I can share your level of wonder," Gwen joked.

He pointed to the scrolling flowers and artwork that, when magnified to an extreme degree, showed flowers and trees and creatures, like a painting on the outside of one of those Russian eggs, but in reverse, on the inside. "That's called a planetseed."

"A what?"

"A planetseed," Jack said. "It's a myth, a thing of legend. A—I feel dizzy."

Gwen grabbed him by the arm and walked him back to the sofa so that he could sink down onto it.

"The planetseed builds a new actual planet out of, well who knows what out of. It yanks matter from everywhere around it. It's God in a ball." Jack waved a hand. "You have to put it somewhere logistical and smart. Not too close, not too far away, not near anything, but with a heat source."

"Like the sun," Gwen said, and Jack tried very hard not to roll his eyes and suggest no, Gwen, the convection oven. Gwen glanced at the display and then up at the invisible lift. "Well, that doesn't sound like something that we should have given them." Her face paled. "Good god, what if they detonated it right here?" She frowned. "What if it had gone off in that body's stomach?"

Jack nodded at her, thinking of Athena bursting from her father's head, fully grown. But as horrible as that thought was, Gwen hadn't got to the punchline yet, just licked off the candy coating of the mystery, of the strangeness.

"Maybe we should go after them."

"Gwen, it belonged to them. It's been assigned a space in, well, space." He blinked and laughed. "It has a time and a place and a history already. There hasn't been a planetseed for…millions of years, see?"

"So it's not supposed to be…?" She drifted off when Jack scrolled his hand and smiled. She shook her head, like clearing cobwebs. "Whose planet is it _going_ to be then?"

Jack leant back and smiled at her. "Theirs."

"What do they need a new planet for? Presumably they already have a…" Gwen sat patiently as her internal processor clicked forward and caught up to the rest, and Jack waited. "That's their home planet," she said. "In that little ball."

Oh, there was his girl. He liked his 'discovery' face. Jack had forgotten he could look that young. Unfortunately, he had also forgotten that he could look that clueless.

Gwen blinked at him, and in the silence he let her put it all together. This was Torchwood. She would see the simplicity of it all. So many things became possible, once you got rid of pesky linear time and introduced space travel, and time travel and more life forms in the universe than could dance on the head of a pin.

"Oh," she said finally. "I guess it's good that we let them take it, then."

Jack leant forward on the sofa and grabbed his head. It hurt to laugh. It hurt a lot.

But he laughed anyway.

 

 **MONDAY**

 _I think there should be something in science called the "reindeer effect." I don't know what it would be, but I think it'd be good to hear someone say, "Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect."_ (Jack Handey)

The day had been long, not unlike the night before Christmas or one's birthday. Gwen stared at the stack of forms that Ianto had said would keep her busy and with which she had to be done before the end of the day.

> 89\. Whilst in the foreign vessel, did you experience any of the following (fill in any that apply on the scantron sheet):
> 
> a. itching  
> b. time travel  
> c. vertigo  
> d. dizziness  
> e. tingling in extremities  
> f. loss of balance or coordination  
> g. slurred speech  
> h. temporary blindness  
> i. shingles  
> j. profuse sweating  
> k. heart palpitations

Gwen glanced up at Ianto, who was fishing things out of the Hub Tub, a weekly ritual that usually came up with horrible things, all contributed by Myfanwy. Well, one time they'd found one of Jack's shoes, and another time a series of foam animals that no one remembered seeing before.

He looked to be engaged in his activity and she wasn't going to _yell_ at him over the forms, unless they turned out to be some sort of sick joke. The light in Jack's office hinted that he was busy working on them too. Every once in a while she would hear a noise in the office that sounded like someone saying "Oh, for—" and then the rustling of papers or a slamming sound. At least they were both having fun.

Her chair was too small, and she didn't like the way it groaned when she shifted. Everyone was engaged, so there was no skiving off there. Tosh had come in and buried herself in work, using her rare yet universal sign of 'don't talk to me' by installing headphones on her ears and humming under her breath. Owen was in the autopsy theatre, had been all day, taking apart things in his backlog in between bitching Jack and Gwen out for 'letting' the Belbels take their dead compatriot. There was only one thing to do when Owen was in this mood, and Tosh was doing it. In fact, the only one paying attention to Owen was Owen himself.

Tosh was kicking herself for not seeing the music ball for what it was, and every time Gwen glanced over at her, she found Tosh staring at the workbench, her eyes off-centred, and Gwen knew that she was thinking about the music ball, planetseed, thingy.

She had been there last night and it was still hard to wrap her brain around (metaphorically, as her brain was not hers, on a physical level, and wasn't that bizarre and slightly frightening. Much in the manner that she was going to replace her toothbrush, Gwen was frightened to think about what synapses Jack might be firing in her skull.). In fact, she had been trying to forget last night, because well, it had contained other things that she wasn't ready to talk about yet.

Even as she thought about it, her cock told her that it was ready to do more than talk about it. She shifted in her chair and it squeaked loudly.

> 89\. Whilst in the foreign vessel, did you (fill in any that apply on the scantron sheet):
> 
> a. Eat any foreign foods (including but not limited to Asian, French, Basque and/or Canadian cuisines)  
> b. Perform any menial tasks that required the use of an allen key  
> c. Engage in intercourse (with the opposite or same sex)  
> d. Ingest any "recreational" or illegal drugs, including retcon (levels 1-4, 6-8)  
> e. Swim or bathe in, drink or come into contact with water from the following bodies: Cardigan Bay, Taff River, Thames River, Loch Ness (If yes, please see appendix 3H9DH.6)  
> f. Watch or listen to any recordings or live showings of Eastenders (If yes, please see appended form 9999J9.J)

Gwen squinted at Ianto and reevaluated his ability for paperwork. She also possessed a new understanding for why so much of it was piled on Jack's desk undone. This was some sort of test, it had to be. Any second the paper would self-destruct or Ianto would take it away and say to her, 'You have passed the trials.' Then they'd have cake.

At one point early in the morning after the debriefing about their intruders, Gwen had almost asked Owen to give her a sedative so that she could sleep through the day and wake up closer to midnight. But the paperwork would have been there still, waiting.

"Ianto!" Jack shouted. "This says that I need appended form B-789FH, but that's not here."

Ianto pulled a bone from the net he held and peered at it before dumping it into the bin beside him. "Yes it is," he replied without even glancing up at the office.

Gwen watched Jack stand in the doorway, a hand on either jamb, and watch Ianto for a second. Was he thinking about…? Gwen didn't want to think about what he and Ianto might have been up to this past week. In fact, she was doing a bang-up job of compartmentalizing it for the time being.

"There's no appended form." Jack finally waved some papers in his hand. "I checked."

"It's on your desk." Ianto dredged for more at the bottom of the tub. Owen walked by and pointed to something in the bottom of the pool. "That's the drain," Ianto told him. "It's permanent."

Jack looked back at his desk. "There's nothing there but a green binder."

"Precisely."

Jack stared at Ianto with the expression of someone who had just been hit in the face with a fish. Was that what she looked like sometimes? Dear God. Gwen thought he was going to protest, to pick a fight, but he just lowered his shoulders.

"If I answer 'no' to all of these questions, it will be obvious that I'm lying right?"

Ianto was unconcerned. "If you answer 'no' to all of the questions, the binder about _why_ you answered 'no' to all of the questions is approximately four hundred pages and in nine point font." He glared at Jack over his shoulder. "Don't make me get the No binder."

Jack sighed and trudged back into the recesses of his office.

Gwen pulled her scantron closer and began to erase the straight line of No's.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tosh sat down across from Jack and waited. She could only see the top of his head; the rest was buried under paperwork and hidden behind the curtain of Gwen's fringe, but she knew he was awake because he was mumbling to himself and erasing a string of what looked like filled-in scantron bubbles. "I'll show you a No binder," he mumbled.

She cleared her throat and Jack sat up, blinking at her, but instead of saying anything like, 'Hello there Toshiko,' or 'Would you like a pasty, Toshiko?' or 'Toshiko, take the day off,' he held up a paper and read from it aloud.

"'I often think about shrimp. Strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree?'"

She shrugged. "Is there a write-in option?"

Jack scanned at the paper. "No, but my first reaction is that this question makes me want a cocktail."

Tosh thought for a bit, stealing a square of chocolate from the open Milka on his desk. "Agree."

Jack filled in a little circle. "It's on your head."

"Fair enough." She crossed her legs. "What can I do for you?" she asked.

Jack set his pencil down and cracked his knuckles. "You can learn how to speak Xarxian." He smiled. "And then you can teach Archie. And then you can unteach those guys in there and teach us all something new."

Tosh followed his gaze to the conference room, where the Xogs were still lodged. They were going to go to Archie, but until the...well, no one had wanted to worry about that until things were _truly_ back to normal. The Xogs were quiet, polite, well-mannered and probably companionable, but Tosh wouldn't know, because she couldn't be in there with them. Ianto had assured her that after they were gone, he was going to thoroughly vacuum and disinfect the conference room, but she doubted that she would be going in there without medication for a few weeks. Owen should install a Claritin lick outside the room so she could just take a few tongue swipes before every meeting.

"You want me to formulate a new derivative language," she clarified.

Jack shoveled an overly large square of Milka in his mouth. "Yesh."

She thought about it. She had the entire Xarxian language in her databases, including pronunciation. The problem was that Xarxians had three windpipes which worked jointly to produce the sounds, and so humans would have a hard time communicating in it properly. If Archie was going to have any sort of working relationship with his new…charges, he would have to create something new, based on the old, but definitely less multi-tonal.

"For when?"

Jack smiled and she sighed. "You're trying to distract me from the planetseed."

Jack's grin never wavered.

"It's just that I should have paid more attention--"

Jack raised a hand and cut her off, then held up a paper. "'True or false: when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, it does not make a sound.'"

She snorted and stood up. Fine, Jack was going to do this thing he always did, where she didn't get her questions answered, but he told her everything he felt she needed to know by not answering anything. "I'll get on it."

Jack flipped a page. "'True or false: I feel pretty and witty and gay.'"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Gwen could feel herself vibrating a little, not unlike being over-caffeinated. In fact, she wasn't sure whether or not she was over-caffeinated, excited, or if this sensation was some sort of by-product of the body switch coming to a close. Whatever it was, she rocked on the balls of her feet as she stood in the old conference room, now used for storage.

Jack nodded to her as Ianto set the box on the table, his hands swathed in pot holders again, as though he was afraid his archival gloves wouldn't be thick enough.

"Everything is just where you left it," Jack said, patting his chest down as if he was checking for his keys and wallet. Perhaps he was saying a fond goodbye to what he'd referred to this morning as, 'The girls'. Gwen rolled her eyes, knowing that anything she would say would just egg him on. "No, really, this morning I shaved your legs. And I've been doing your kegel exercises for you."

Gwen stared at him. Thank god this was only going to be a running gag for a few more minutes. It occurred to her that she was finally one of Jack's sexy sexy stories, and that maybe in fifty years, he would be telling it over Chinese to a whole new group of Torchwood employees, and they would all laugh hysterically. She wasn't sure whether or not she should be amused by that.

Whatever she looked like must have been distressing, because Jack's grin slid off his face. "Gwen, a joke. Remember those?"

Gwen's mouth twitched. "A joke," she said, "is your shampoo." She smiled. "Wash and Go? Seriously? I replaced it with Mane N Tail."

Ianto pulled the tea cosy from the box and stepped back. "Joke when this is over," he said to them. Gwen thought he looked a tad relieved. It was worth considering just what they had got up to with her body; probably something questionable. Once again (this was becoming paranoia), she wondered if she'd find racy polaroids stashed about the Hub some day, and the thought stopped her cold. Dear Jesus, they wouldn't have.

Jack rubbed his hands together. "I think, given what happened last time, we might want to sit down or something." He pulled out one of the conference room chairs and plopped himself in it, and she rounded the table so that she could sit opposite him. Across from her, her body stilled, both hands flat on the table. Jack smiled reassuringly at her, and she noticed that he'd changed her lipstick shade, and it was, she had to admit, a bit more flattering.

"I bit your fingernails down," she confessed, raising a hand.

Jack grinned. "Saves me the trouble."

Ianto made a soft noise in his throat. "I'm just going back here, behind the blast shield." Sure enough, he'd erected a small Plexiglas demolition shield at the far end of the room and stood behind it, crossing his arms. Tosh darted in with the sensor equipment and slipped in behind Ianto. Owen, as he had told them a few moments earlier, was in the autopsy theatre, waiting for heinous results. They should have done this in the shooting range. Oh well, it had worked earlier with everyone else.

Gwen closed her eyes and took a deep breath. This was her last moment of The Jack Harkness Experience, and she was ever so glad to be rid of it. She was fairly sure that Jack felt the same, if his constant bitching about her body maintenance had been any indication.

"Gwen, it's been swell," Jack said aloud, and she smiled. "But the swelling's gone dow—"

The light was blinding, and unlike with the Xogs and the Xarxians, it was more than just light. It felt like a bomb had gone off in her outer ear. Jack kicked her under the table and she bucked her own legs a bit. Her fingers curled on the tabletop and then whatever it was hit her in the face, like running into a cement wall.

The sound and light were only a split second long, and then it was over. Gwen looked up, blinked a few times, and tried to assess herself. Across from her Jack was staring at his hands. She could feel her heart speed up when she wondered what had gone wrong, why did this look so odd, why did this feel so strange—

"Gwen," Jack said, staring at her accusingly. "I know you said you bit them down, but look at them!"

Ianto popped his head from the blastshield. "Ah, all done?"

She looked at her hands, longer nails, then down at—oh, hello, girls.

"Yes," she told Ianto without looking away from her chest. "Yes we are."

Thirty minutes later she stood on the upper level above the autopsy theatre and watched Owen finish the last of the tests on Jack and his body.

"As far as I can tell, you're back to normal." Owen set the last scanner down and dusted his hands, but that was probably just for show. "You know, considering all the other things that are _abnormal_ about you."

Jack smiled. "There's that bedside manner."

Owen turned away. "Failed that one too."

Gwen wiggled her toes in her trainers and tapped her fingers on the railing. She shook her head and was comforted by the movement of her hair across her face. Earlier she'd gone into the loo and checked under her clothes that everything was where it was supposed to be (it was). She even felt clean. Why she had thought that Jack would somehow be incapable of cleaning her body properly was a right mystery. But she had seen Jack run his fingers through his hair in the reflection of the glass wall already, and when she had been going in for her round of tests she was sure she'd seen him groping himself, so at least she wasn't the only paranoid freak in this equation.

"That's it," she murmured, "this is all done."

Ianto leaned on the railing next to her and gave her a conspiratorial smile that was truly meant for her. "You can consider this caper terminated."

"I hadn't finished all my answers," she admitted. "I was halfway done."

Ianto shrugged. "Torchwood One is gone, who reads that shite? Not me." He leant even further in. "Just between us, of course."

"Then why would you—"

Ianto smiled. "It kept you distracted, didn't it?"

Gwen watched Jack make funny faces, like he was stretching out his mouth or yawning. It was hard to tell. "You are an evil genius, Ianto Jones."

"I've often thought so."

Gwen bumped his shoulder with her own. Jack jumped up and down experimentally for some unfathomable reason and then bounded up the stairs to the atrium.

"Archie is gleeful to get his hands on giant alien guard dogs that might be helpful in fetching and ripping things up," Jack said, then glanced at the smallest one, the Jack Russell. "Or, you know, just barking and jumping up and down at the first sign of possible trouble. Or birds. We should get them out there soon. Toshiko, do you have it?"

Tosh handed him the small external hard drive. "Archie has everything we have. He just has to install the program, and it'll do itself. It's artificially intelligent, so it will learn as they go." She smiled. "Archie will never speak Xarxian, but they won't either." She nodded at the dogs. "Maybe they'll make up something new."

"A Scots-English-Xarxic pidgin." Jack tapped the disks against his chin, pondering. Gwen liked when he pondered in his own form; it definitely looked more heroic than his feeble attempts in her body. It was the posture. It had to be the posture. "Hrm. Do you think it'll have a burr? I like languages that have a burr. Maybe some rolling R's. Or a silent Q. You can't go wrong with a silent Q."

Ianto stood from laying down a bunch of newsprint. "They're all sorted for the night. I think I managed to stammer out something about not sleeping on our chairs." He shrugged. "At least they don't look offended."

Tosh shouldered her purse and Gwen mirrored her. "Well, then, if that's it, Jack…."

Jack smiled. "Oh yeah. Everything is quiet, we're all tired, and I want the house to myself so I can order pizza and talk like a sailor. Everyone go away." He shoved his hands in his pockets and rolled on the balls of his feet, smiling.

Gwen sighed. It was just as well. She needed to settle back to being herself before she wanted to talk about it. But she _did_ want to say something, she just wasn't sure what yet. She felt compacted, too small, and the events of the days before shifted in her skull like child's clay smashed into a plastic container.

She wanted to talk to Jack about what had happened when the bullet had hit her, when her vision had gone black, and she had thought that one last time, _oh, this isn't right_. She wanted to ask him what he saw, or if he ever remembered. He once told her that there was nothing in the darkness, but she wasn't so sure that it was true. Something she carried with her, in her heart, it felt, was new and shiny, like it had been borne all the way back from the afterlife and transplanted in her psyche, and she sometimes sensed it right out of her perception, not unlike movement in the corner of her vision.

Or she could have been compensating for the truth, Jack's truth, and all that it conflicted with what she'd been brought up to believe about life after death. It wouldn't have been the first time Jack's worldview had ripped hers to shreds. She also wondered if it did, or if she just let it.

She opened her mouth to speak, but the only thing she could say was, "And what do we do with the dogs, then? Ship them up freight?"

"I'll drive them up tomorrow," Owen offered, coming up to join them in the atrium. "What? I like dogs."

Gwen was in the middle of contemplating Owen's hidden tenderness, when he shrugged. "Besides," he added, "the ladies love a man with a dog."

Ah, truly back to normal, then.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Jack's statement to the contrary, not even he had wanted to stay at the Hub tonight. Not with the Xogs still trapped in the conference room. Ianto had tried to use what language he knew of the Xarxians to convey (again) the idea of what the papers were for in the far corner of the room, but he wasn't sure if he'd have to fumigate and vacuum and clean the carpets tomorrow. At the moment, he was just pleased to be away from the drool and dog hair. He liked dogs, as long as they weren't his. His hands were full with human maintenance.

So Owen had taken Tosh out for a 'we're single and footloose' drink, and Gwen had gone home to Rhys (much to her relief, Ianto could see it on her face), and Jack had turned towards his office when Ianto had laid a hand on his arm and said, rather pointedly, he thought, that Jack would go insane if he stayed in the Hub with all the Xogs (except he didn't say that out loud, he just thought the word.). So when Ianto had prepped to go home, he hadn't been surprised to meet Jack at the cog door stairs, coat on, face drawn and tired.

"I have to admit something to you," Jack said as they climbed the stairs to Ianto's flat.

"Admit what?" he said distractedly. Distracted, because even though they had been alone in the Hub for the rest of the evening, left together, had walked back to his flat together, had just ascended the three flights of stairs together, Jack had yet to say or do anything remotely sexual. It wasn't that Jack was incapable --as Ianto well knew, especially considering the last week-- of being anything other than 'business,' but he rather thought that they, well, that was why they were coming back here, right? Business as usual. The _other_ business.

Jack watched him fumble his keys. "I was really afraid for a second there," he said, face serious and not a little bit tentative. "When Gwen died, I thought, just for a second, I thought…." He looked away. "For once, I was glad that it wasn't me." When he returned his gaze to Ianto, his smile was wan. "How's that for a leader, huh?"

He didn't know what to say, perhaps there was nothing to say to that, just nod and acknowledge it because Jack needed to say it. That happened sometimes; Jack would say something like this, because there was no one else.

So he nodded and opened the door, entering and throwing his keys on the table; he shed his coats, hung them in the closet. He toed off his shoes at the door; he wasn't a neat freak or anything, he'd just mistakenly tracked in entrails too many times. Jack followed suit with a bit more clumsiness at his laces, as if he was relearning how his hands worked.

Perhaps that was it, then. Did Jack have to settle back into himself, like relearning how to play an instrument after some time? A week wasn't long in the scheme of things, but who knew how muscle memory worked? How long was it? Would it be longer for Jack, Jack with his unique ability, to stretch out and relearn the limits and movements of a body that barely aged, didn't die, rarely slept?

Would he miss what he'd tasted again so briefly? Had that vulnerable part of being alive, truly mortal in Gwen even been perceptible? Had he felt it?

"Well," he said, heading to the kitchen and leaving Jack with his laces. "If you had been stuck in Gwen, I suppose I'd have to work out a rota with Rhys." Sometimes humor was the best way to deal with these things. And this was treading too close to a relationship talk, and he and Jack didn't have those. He was just fine with that.

Jack didn't want to talk about Rhys, obviously, because he snorted and shoved his hands in his pockets, finally abandoning his shoes at the door. Coat, shoes, all the things that made it easy to just walk out; that was heartening. Ianto watched him shuffle through to the kitchenette and lean on the counter, almost putting his head on his hands.

"I'm glad it's over, really." He turned his head and looked at Ianto coquettishly. "I was not made for heels and menstrual cycles."

Ianto barked a laugh as he poured them both glasses of water from the pitcher. It kept his hands busy, and he still had no idea what they were going to do now that they had arrived. Just pick up where they had left off? Have a heart to heart? Drink heavily? Watch _Barbarella_ like some domesticated thing that they weren't (And did anyone ever watch that with a straight face?)? Because something in Ianto recognised, and he had to pause in mid swallow as it hit him, that somewhere in the middle of the week, he'd got used to the curve of Jack against him, the softness in him, and that was gone now. And some of him might remember it, in the night, in the dark, when he took the man in hand. And he wasn't sure if he would regret that.

Jack unbent then, handling his glass with the surety of someone used to his skin, to his muscles, and Ianto thought perhaps he had imagined the unsteadiness before. Perhaps Jack just recovered that quickly. Ianto set his glass down and rounded Jack for the toilet.

When he returned, Jack was meandering about the living area. The blankets from the night earlier that week were still folded in a pile on the floor by the sofa. He stood and watched Jack touch the back of the sofa, as if he needed to be able to feel it with his own fingers.

Ianto clapped his hands together once, lightly, as if he was calling a meeting to order. Jack's mouth quirked, and he knew why; it was a gesture that he'd picked up from Jack, and sometimes he wondered if anything of his had rubbed off on the other man. Because he rather thought that if anything, it was reassuring that Jack might adopt a habit or two from him. Something to take with him into infinity.

"Well, it's late" he said, "but we've limited choices for this evening."

"We could see a film," Jack said, shrugging. "I know the projectionist at the Multiplex."

Ianto nodded gravely. "We could. We could also go to some random restaurant, if they'll have us."

Jack smiled at the open empty _Barbarella_ case on the top of the DVD player and turned on the telly to the blue video screen. "We could get take-away, or go get some beer. I bet you could use a drink."

Ianto sighed and ran a hand along the back of the sofa. "I could use several, actually."

Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets and circled the DVD rack. "Or we could just have sex," he offered.

"Oh thank god," Ianto said, picking at the knot of his tie. "You had me worried there."

Jack pulled his hands out of his pockets and began to unbutton his shirt, pulling the tails from his waistband. "I know. You should have seen your face." He pulled the shirt over his head as soon as the neck was wide enough and tossed it at Ianto. "Such a stiff upper lip."

Ianto whipped his tie at Jack. Jack responded with his vest. Ianto pulled his belt from the loops, doubled it over, and made a circle of the halves, a hand on either end. He pulled it taut with a crack. Jack kicked off his trousers and toed off his socks.

"Ooooh," Jack mocked when Ianto stepped towards him, and then he fell backwards onto the sofa behind him. "Oh wait, put on _Barbarella_."

Ianto smirked and picked up the remote, tapping it on one leg. "Pervert."

He pressed play.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Gwen much preferred afterglow when she could snuggle in Rhys's arms without him pitching a fit. And also, when she could actually _fit_ into his arms comfortably. He smelled good, like cologne and roasted garlic and fabric softener, and he radiated heat. She threaded her fingers in his chest hair and relaxed into the feeling of having just been thoroughly shagged.

Just one thing, though--she felt her breasts. They _were_ sore. "I think Jack was right. I am getting my period."

Rhys snorted. "And yet another tender moment ruined by Jack Harkness," he moaned. Gwen licked his shoulder and he slapped her arse. "You can't out-gross me."

Gwen sighed. "It's good to be back to normal," she said to the air. "Really rather good."

Rhys shifted and she rolled on her back so that he could turn on his side and prop his head up on his hand, looking at her. His face was still a little sweaty. "So, what was it like, being a bloke for a few?"

She thought for a long moment. "I get why you think about sex all the time," she began, and laughed when he blew a raspberry. "No really, it wasn't the man part as much as it was the whole not-being-me thing." _And the dying thing,_ she didn't add. "I dunno. I didn't get a chance to do much," she said finally.

Rhys raised his eyebrows. "If I was a woman, I'd wank all day."

"You'd wank all day anyway."

"That's fair." Rhys smiled. "I bet Jack felt himself up a lot." With one hand he mimed breasts on his chest and she kicked him.

"I don't want to think about what he did," she said loudly, "and I am happy never knowing." Which wasn't accurate in the strictest sense of the word, but she didn't care to take that part further.

Rhys stared at her for a second, and she wondered if he could see it on her face, what she and Jack had done, if he could sense that she knew what it felt like to have hands on her cock, mouths on body parts that she no longer possessed. "So, anything you regret not doing?"

She paused to think about it. What should she say? "I don't know. If I haven't done it, then I can't regret it, can I?" And wasn't that rather loaded? She tried not to look away from his eyes, because if she did, even in the moonlight, he'd see it.

Rhys broke the stare first. "Well, it's over now, yeah?" He rolled out of bed and stretched. "But see, this whole thing put a little bit of a kink in my plans for your birthday."

She propped herself up on her elbows and watched him pad towards the closet. "Oh?"

Rhys didn't answer, just rummaged on the top shelf, behind the stacks of winter sweaters they always meant to store away but never did. "Yeah, see." He found what he wanted and she watched his arse as he stood with his back to her, extracting something from a plastic shopping bag.

"What?"

"Well they…at the shop they said it was all the rage, or something. More popular now, I guess." Even in the moonlight she could see him blushing as he turned to her and held out the box. "I didn't want to get into a big conversation about it with the shopgirl, but I thought—"

She took the box and stared at the logo for the local sex shop. Her heart thudded in her chest like it had when she had been in another body. That had been another lifetime ago, it seemed.

Rhys gave her a little secret smile, one that she recognised from other people's faces, sometimes even her own. "I thought you might, uhm, yeah?"

"Oh," was all she said, because a part of her that she didn't have anymore almost stirred despite its absence. Her fingers prised off the lid and drifted along the silicon of the dildo, the leather of the harness. "Oh."

Rhys blushed. "Believe it or not, I bought it three weeks ago."

 

 **TUESDAY (EPILOGUE)**

 _I don't understand people who say life is a mystery, because what is it they want to know?_ (Jack Handey)

"You are indeed a brave little toaster, Gwen Cooper," Jack said from behind her. "I have to admit, while I like it up here, I can afford to be careless."

Gwen turned and watched Jack make his way out to the forward strut of the Altolusso. She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and followed the lines of traffic below. Her feet felt much surer than the last two times, when she had been in Jack's body. Just being herself was somewhat of a confidence builder.

The wind wasn't anywhere nearly as strong as the last time, and it was reassuring. The view went on for miles and miles. She felt heady and a little bit drunk, her stomach flipping like just before her roller coaster car tipped over the top of the hill and surged downward.

"Oh, just adding things to The Gwen Cooper Experience."

Jack joined her, bracing his feet, hands in his pockets, matching her stance as they looked out over the city. "I liked The Gwen Cooper Experience," he told her. "I mean, it beats The Owen Harper Experience."

Gwen snorted. "I don't think I want to imagine that."

"Let's give Owen some credit. I'm sure he'd have been perfectly lovely with tits," Jack said then, his eyes scanning out over the city. Sometimes she thought he fancied himself Cardiff's very own Dark Avenger. Maybe he was. She glanced down at her bright red trainers. Did that make her the Girl Wonder?

She amused herself casting the rest of Torchwood as superheroes for a few minutes (Tosh was Wonder Woman, Owen was The Incredible Hulk, et cetera), watching the sunlight catch the glass windows of the buildings around her. She was right pleased with herself for even getting up here, and she intended on enjoying it.

"Ianto and I," Jack said, his voice low, "we didn't do anything. I just thought you should know."

Gwen blushed a bit. The memory of Sunday night was a little embarrassing and surreal, like remembering a television episode one saw once three years ago whilst high in the middle of the night.

"Do you want to talk—"

"Oh dear god no," Gwen said quickly. "Repression is good for this. This is why they make repression."

Jack looked away. "Yeah, works for me." He was quiet for a moment and then, "It's okay," he said, eyes suddenly bright, "Because this morning before you all got in, we found a pair of your knickers under my bunk—"

Gwen laughed. "You two are perved," she told him. Before he opened his mouth again, "Keep them. Wait, which ones?"

Jack raised his eyebrows, then closed his eyes. "Green. Lacy. Kind of like y-fronts."

"Ah. Yeah, definitely keep them. A gift from me to your extra-curricular activities. They're called boykinis," she added. "Though I guess for you they're boykinkis."

Jack smirked. "I don't think I can top that." The wind picked up and she swayed. Jack's close arm snaked about her waist and pulled her in. She pressed her head against his shoulder. "I wasn't really joking when I said that I don't think you should be up here doing this," he warned.

Gwen reached down to her waist and lifted the climber's rope attached to the harness she wore over her denims and under her coat. The cord ran in thick ropes down to the strut, where it was lashed with multiple knots and carabiners. Jack glanced at it and at her face, raising an eyebrow before laughing.

Gwen laughed too, loudly, almost bending at the waist; she couldn't help herself. It was such a relief to hear herself laugh, her own vowels, and her voice when she said something. It was so bloody amazing to pull on her clothes, to brush her hair, to sit on her sofa at home and curl up inside Rhys's arms.

"I stand corrected," Jack said finally, arm still firmly around her waist as he stared off into the distance, eyes tracking something she couldn't find in the sky. "You can come up here anytime."

Gwen considered the rope at her waist, hand playing on the carabiner. "Oh, I think this is all you," she said finally. "It's not my thing. I just needed to do it once, myself, you know?"

A set of gulls swooped past them, racing in the wind, on their way to the bay, no doubt; the steady stream of traffic and the blaring of horns contributed to an overall sense of movement. Everything was churning on, just as it should, just as it would, like any other day, regardless of what body she was in, really.

"Someday," she said, squinting into the sun and resolutely not looking at him. "I want to talk about what happened." She didn't have to say what thing she meant. He knew. Just like she knew he understood without looking at him.

"That conversation is best in the darkness, in the nighttime," he said in a low voice, pulling his arm away, drawing into himself a little. "But when you're ready, let me know."

That was comforting. Jack could wait, and so could she. There was no force, no hurry, just a running current of knowing that wasn't critical, the slow easiness of a cask in the dark, aging and waiting on a long-term schedule.

"It was fun, you have to admit," Jack said finally. "Like a holiday."

"Oh please," Gwen replied, rolling her eyes. "I don't even know how you manage to cope with all that in your trousers. The running alone—"

Jack barked a laugh. "I wear _underwear_." She didn't bother to correct that to _Well, some of the time._ "And besides, sister, you do not want to nit-pick about things that bounce when you run."

There was a gust of wind and she had to raise her arms to steady herself a little; the strut almost groaned in the breeze, as if it had been engineered to sway through things like this. Jack kept his hands in his pockets, moving with it, unperturbed.

"What were you planning on doing if you actually fell?" He studied the cord and the scaffolding of the building below.

Gwen shrugged. "Curse your name, and then call Ianto to help me up."

Jack nodded. "A wise choice."

Her comm beeped in her pocket and she didn't bother to get it because Jack answered his bluetooth, already clipped to his ear. "Toshiko, top o' the morning."

"Jack," Tosh said brightly through the outer speaker. "Good morning! I've a pasty for you."

Jack smiled out at the city. "Oh, you are truly my girl. What can Gwen and I do for you?"

"I've got some strange readings in Grangetown, and I think our friends from the Ceephus ring might be back to strip more copper from those empty houses."

Gwen groaned and Jack snorted. They hated the Ceephus-dwellers; they were ugly, manky little fuckers who stripped houses and took all the copper and marble back with them wherever to make nests where they grew more little Ceephus..es. Ceephi? Whatever. And they smelled like rotting cheese. And under emotional pressure they exploded. Gwen looked at her trainers and said goodbye to them with the wisdom of one who had dealt with smelly exploding Ceeph…us…i before.

"All right, send the coordinates to the navsat and we'll check it out." He glanced at Gwen, who was unhooking the carabiners. They had to go, and this was the tricky part. "Have Ianto prep a hazmat suit or industrial hose or something."

"I do love the firehose," Ianto piped in, and Gwen started. Of course he was listening in. Only Owen wasn't, since he was probably halfway to Glasgow by now, just him, the open road and a car full of Xogs.

Jack terminated the call and sighed. "Ceephus," he muttered as he turned away to walk back down the strut. "Sometimes I hate my job."

Gwen raised her arms so that she could walk along the strut, balance beam like. She had left the ropes lashed to it, in a just-in-case maneuver. Just-in-case she ever did want to come back up. If anyone came up here and saw them, they'd probably have a little bit of a start.

"The game is 'I love my job'."

Jack turned and held out his hand for her and she jumped off the shallow ledge and onto the gravel of the roof. "That's a dumb game. If you hate your job, you should say so."

Gwen let him kiss her hand before pulling it away and rolling her eyes. "I love my job."

Jack's eyes twinkled. "Good answer. On another note," he continued and they walked towards the rooftop door, "That shampoo you bought me? Much better."

Gwen smirked. "Well, I guess we're even for the lip gloss, then," she told him, and then they shut the door behind them and started the long trip down.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

>  **Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam:** (Klingon) Today is a good day to die. ;P


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